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Win32Api

Mon, January 31, 2005, 04:01 PM under MobileAndEmbedded
Every .NET developer is familiar with platform invocation services (PInvoke), the ability to call native functions declared in dlls via the DllImport attribute. In the early .NET days it was common to see queries about specific API declarations, but 4 years down the road you would have thought people would stop asking and instead use the ready-made ones easily found all over the web. This blog entry is proof of the opposite and it will serve as my pointer next time someone requests a particular Win32 DllImport declaration.

First place to go is the pinvoke wiki (tip: check out the Helpful tools). This was started by Adam Nathan (author of the only COM Interop book you need, which covers interoperability in general and not just COM).

From a Compact Framework perspective, the first place to go is the OpenNETCF source. Search it for the API name you are after and steal the C# DllImport declaration :-)

In addition to the above, since I often refer to a Win32Api class in both newsgroup and blog posts, I include here a link to my own Win32Api.vb (as the extension suggests, it is in VB.NET so the C#-challenged amongst you may prefer it)

Win32Api is a class with the dllimports that I use in my projects (exposed as Shared methods). It started life years ago when I was doing desktop development and was subsequently morphed to support both compact and Full frameworks (hint: look for the FULL_FRAME compilation constant). I don't claim to have crafted every declaration myself, quite the opposite, half of them are probably lifted from ready made declarations found on the web :-)
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