Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 7, Help and Research

#62 Use P/Invoke with Ease

HACK

Using PInvoke.NET

PInvoke.NET is a wiki that acts as a reference for P/Invoke signatures and

unmanaged APIs.

A wiki is a web site that can easily be edited by anyone using

the web site—and I mean anyone. This allows a large num-

ber of people to pool their knowledge and research in a sin-

gle location. For more information about wikis, please refer

to the original wiki at: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb.

Using PInvoke.NET, you can look for, and usually find, the P/Invoke signa-

ture call that you are looking for. The PInvoke.NET main screen is shown in

Figure 7-14.

As an example, let’s look for the signature for the

FindWindow API.

If you knew that

FindWindow was located in user32.dll, you could browse

using the tree on the left of the screen. Or you could simply enter the term

FindWindow in the Search box and the first result would be the page shown in

Figure 7-15.

This page contains a number of details about the

FindWindow API. The first

item on the page is the C# signature needed to call this API from C#. The

Figure 7-14. PInvoke.NET