.NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide

Chapter 18. The Essentials of PInvoke

In This Chapter

• Using PInvoke in Visual Basic .NET

• Using PInvoke in Other .NET Languages

• Choosing the Right Parameter Types

• Customizing Declare and DllImportAttribute

Up until now, this book has focused on one kind of unmanaged code—COM components. There’s plenty of unmanaged code, however, that does not expose functionality via COM. Instead, DLLs often expose a list of static entry points—functions that can be called directly from other applications. Such functions are not organized in objects or interfaces, but rather are exposed as a simple, flat list. The most common example of static entry points is the thousands of Win32 APIs exposed by system DLLs such as KERNEL32.DLL, GDI32.DLL, USER32.DLL ...