Easiest way to generate P/Invoke code?

Posted by Ope on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ope
Published on 2010-03-22T20:50:37Z Indexed on 2010/03/22 20:51 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 507

Filed under:

pinvoke

|

c#

|

c

I am an experienced .Net programer, but have not compiled a C/C++ program in my life. Now I have this C-dll, headers and documentation (3rd party, not from Win API), from which I need to call about ten methods.

I was thinking of using Platform Invoke. I found these three tools that would create the code for me:

PInvoker: http://www.pinvoker.com
P/Invoke Interop Assistant: http://www.codeplex.com/clrinterop
P/Invoke Wizard: http://www.paulyao.com/res/pinvoke/pinvoke.aspx

and possibly

Swig: http://www.swig.org/

Pinvoker seems to have a bit different approach than the Interop assistant and the Wizard. Swig I just found when checking that this question has not been asked here.

What are the pros and cons of these tools?

What would be the best = easiest and safest way for me to produce the P/Invoke code given that I don't know much about C/C++?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about pinvoke

c# pinvoke marshall struct

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi, I have an unmanaged struct I'd like to marshal to c# that looks basically like this: struct DateTimeStruct{ double datetimestamp; }; struct MyStruct{ char firstname[40]; char lastname[40]; DateTimeStruct bday; unsigned integer bool1; int val1; }; What is the the correct… >>> More
Using pinvoke in c# to call sprintf and friends on 64-bit

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I am having an interesting problem with using pinvoke in C# to call _snwprintf. It works for integer types, but not for floating point numbers. This is on 64-bit Windows, it works fine on 32-bit. My code is below, please keep in mind that this is a contrived example to show the behavior I am seeing… >>> More
Using PInvoke vs .NET provided functions

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
From version to version of .NET the more function that's equal to P/Invoke is added to .NET Now there are 2 questions in my mine. 1) Which one is prefer other the other in term of speed, normally I use .Net function but in tight loop I don't really know which one is going to be faster. 2) Is there… >>> More
PInvoke Unbalances the stack

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Good afternoon, I have been working on a dll that can use CORBA to communicate to an application that is network aware. The code works fine if I run it as a C++ console application. However, I have gotten stuck on exporting the methods as a dll. The methods seems to export fine, and if I call… >>> More
C Sharp -- PInvokeStackImbalance detected on a well documented function?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Here is my code for a ClickMouse() function: [DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall)] public static extern void mouse_event(long dwFlags, long dx, long dy, long cButtons, long dwExtraInfo); private const long MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTDOWN… >>> More

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More