Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Doing Interop with Win32 APIs in DotNet

PINVOKE.NET attempts to address the difficulty of calling Win32 or other unmanaged APIs in managed code (languages such as C# and VB .NET). Manually defining and using PInvoke signatures (also known as Declare statements in VB) is an error-prone process that can introduce extremely subtle bugs. The rules are complex, and if you make a mistake, you’ll probably corrupt memory.
Therefore, this site is a repository where you can find, edit, and add PInvoke signatures, user-defined types, and any other information that helps us leverage each other's efforts. Think of this as the 21st century version of VB6's "API Text Viewer," a standalone application which used static files such as WIN32API.TXT as input. Did you spend hours figuring out how to successfully define & call a given unmanaged API in managed code? Share (and get credit for) your discovery here! Is there an error on this site? Go ahead and fix it!

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