Calling Visual Studio DLL in a C# program

[Ambroise YAO]

Dear All,

I am doing a project in two diffents environments: The calling fuction in C# and the DLLs in Visual Studio C++, as I feel a "little comfortable" in VS C ++.
Unfortunately, although this is clearly visible in the project, we cannot add it as a reference in the C# project.

How could we manage that ?

Thank you for help.

Ambroise YAO

[Ambroise YAO]

Hi There,

As regard to my problem, I try to resolve it in 3 phases:
1. make a DLL + LIB in VS C (ex. CalculationAverage function)
2. make a class in C ++ to call this DLL (+ LIB)
3. call this C ++ class in C #

The first is OK.
But the 2nd point is not OK, because I cannot access the functions defined in 1). The error is that the function is unknown, despite everything I give it (.LIB, .H)

Can someone help me take this step?

Best Regards
Ambroise YAO

[Arjay]

C# via pinvoke can only call DLLs having functions exported with c-style signatures.

So this means that you cannot call a DLL from C# that exports C++ classes.

This is because there is no standard around the c++ name mangling so it is compiler and version specific and as a result, the pinvoke approach in .net won't work.

That being said, you can implement the DLL internally with C++ as long as the exported functions are c-style and don't pass classes.

For help with looking a pinvoke examples, see http://pinvoke.net

[James West]

Hi,

I was facing the same situation and I fixed it by doing as recommaded by the post of ARJAY

James

[James West]

OK, thank you.
It is working