Platform Invocation Services - Tools

Tools

There are a number of tools which are designed to aid in the production of P/Invoke signatures.

Writing a utility application that would import C++ header files and native DLL files and produce an interface assembly automatically turns out to be quite difficult. The main problem with producing such an importer/exporter for P/Invoke signatures is the ambiguity of some C++ function call parameter types.

Brad Abrams has this to say on the subject: The P/Invoke Problem.

The problem lies with C++ functions like the following:

__declspec(dllexport) void MyFunction(char *params);

What type should we use for the parameter params in our P/Invoke signature ? This could be either a C++ null terminated string, or could be a char array or could be an output char parameter. So should we use string, StringBuilder, char or ref char ?

Regardless of this issue, there are a few tools available to make the production of P/Invoke signatures simpler.

One of the tools listed below, C#/.NET P/Invoke Interop SDK has actually successfully resolved this issue by implementing multiple overrides of the same C++ method in .NET world, developers can then pick the correct one to make the call.