Employing elegance in order to evade importing elephants: a case of excessive dll Imports

Posted by user994179 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by user994179
Published on 2012-07-07T20:55:37Z Indexed on 2012/07/07 21:15 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 409

Filed under:

c#

|

marshalling

|

dllimport

|

graphic

I am writing C# code that interfaces to a legacy (Feb 2012) C program, using DllImport. It works fine, but I need to call more than 30 different functions, turning my normally impeccable, exquisite code into something of near-elephantine proportions. Surely there must be a way around this? [Warning: those with weak stomachs may want to avert their eyes from what follows]:

    [DllImport("C:\\Users\\mitt\\Documents\\Visual Studio 2010\\Projects\\mrSolution\\mr\\x64\\Debug\\mrDll.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl, CharSet = CharSet.Ansi)]
    public static extern bool mrEngine_initialize(     [In, Out, MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPStruct)] PLOT_SPEC PlotSpec);
    [DllImport("C:\\Users\\mitt\\Documents\\Visual Studio 2010\\Projects\\mrSolution\\mr\\x64\\Debug\\mrDll.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl, CharSet = CharSet.Ansi)]
    public static extern bool mrEngine_getDataPoint(   [In, Out, MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPStruct)] PLOT_SPEC PlotSpec);

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

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
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
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
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

Related posts about marshalling

Interface Marshalling in Delphi

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I want to send Interface Ref of IVApplication from Visio Add-in to my other one COM server. But I have Ole exception. Now i do that: Code in Visio Add-in: var IStrm: IStream; hres: HResult; rhglobal: HGLOBAL; VisioAppl: IVApplication; begin hres := CreateStreamOnHGlobal(0, TRUE, IStrm); … >>> More
Quirks in .NET – Part 3 Marshalling Numbers

as seen on ASP.net Weblogs - Search for 'ASP.net Weblogs'
Kevin has posted about marshalling numbers in the 3rd part of his ongoing blog series. Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software services and product development company based in Washington DC. Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product… >>> More
Why is the concept of Marshalling called as such?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I've always thought that the concept of Marshalling had a bit of a funny name. My mental conception of the process would always involve an ol' wildwest gunslinging marshall who would coerce objects into serialized form at gunpoint. I just found out the real reason Marshalling is called what… >>> More
Fastest way to access VB6 String in C#

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi I am using COMInterop. I have a call in VB6 which returns a string of roughly 13000 chars. If I execute the call in pure VB6 it takes about 800ms to execute. If I execute it via c# and COMInterop it takes about 8 seconds. I'm assuming the delay is caused by marshalling. If I am correct about… >>> More
How to Customize JAXB Marshalling if generating JAXB beans from XML

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hello, I want to customize the marshalling of dates in JAXB. It's a variant of this already asked question. I would think I would use an XMLAdapter, as this answer questions specifies. But I can't do that exactly, because I'm going the other way around, generating the JAXB beans from an .XSD --… >>> More