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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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  • Interop? .. . . – Robert Harvey Jan 25 '13 at 0:07
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    If you are ok being beholden to Windows platform COM would probably be the way to go. – whatsisname Jan 25 '13 at 6:16
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    @whatsisname: You don't need COM. You can call DLL's with C calling convention from C#. – Robert Harvey Jan 25 '13 at 20:36
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    @RobertHarvey: that is true, but you have the hassle of creating a C wrapper API around your objects. While COM isn't hassle free either, it can provide a better C# <-> C++ interface for objects. – whatsisname Feb 7 '13 at 0:49
  • If they live in different OS processes, named pipe is indeed a suitable choice. – rwong Apr 3 '13 at 2:56
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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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    This only works well if the API only exhibits C types. Using an API that exhibits C++ types that way is problematic. – CodesInChaos Mar 3 '13 at 15:36

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