I am currently building an audio streamer and I have a CPP .dll that I use functions of inside the WPF C# GUI.
The program needs to deal with sorts of events such as
- Lower/Increase Volume
- Manipulate Equalizer Bands
To this point I have used named events to deal with this issue. What would be a better way of handling all those events from the GUI to the .dll? The events system I use (.dll spawns a thread which while-s on a WaitForMultipleObjects), or would it be better/smarter/more-beneficial or just better-practice to use a named pipe instead?
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You can call from C# to C/C++ directly using a technology known as P/Invoke. With P/Invoke, a C++ function can be made to look just like a C# function.
Here’s a simple example from this article in MSDN Magazine:
C Method Definition
BOOL MessageBeep(
UINT uType // beep type
);
P/Invoke Definition in C# of method in C
[DllImport("User32.dll")]
static extern Boolean MessageBeep(UInt32 beepType);
Calling the C method from C#
MessageBeep(0);
Now, isn’t that simple & clean? Much of the .NET Base Class Library is implemented as C/C++ code with a P/Invoke wrapper and a C# facade. The .NET team itself uses P/Invoke rather than COM for this type of interop, it’s simpler and more efficient.
A great resource for finding how to write P/Invoke method definitions is pinvoke.net.
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