Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Encapsulating P/Invokes

Encapsulating P/Invokes in classes is a programming best practice and makes your code clearer and more meaningful. Continuing the previous example, you could create a new class and declare inside the class the PathIsUrl function, marking it as Shared so that it can be consumed by other objects. By the way, there is another consideration to make. If you plan to wrap Windows API functions in reusable class libraries, the best approach is to provide CLS-compliant libraries and API calls. For this reason we now discuss how you can encapsulate P/Invokes following the rules of the Common Language Specification. The first rule is to create a class that stores only P/Invokes declarations. Such a class must be visible only within ...