CsWin32 VS cppcomponents

This was mostly a project for fun, to dive into CsWin32 - a PInvoke source generator as well to fiddle around with the DWM API.

If you haven't seen the CsWin32 project, you can use it to generate all your bindings as well. It generates the raw extern bindings, and then friendly wrappers for C# (where possible) that also work really well with PowerShell.

If you're looking for something different, try out writing windows programs using Win32 via CsWin32. You can generate a DLL that you Add-Type into PowerShell that lets you access all of Win32.

Also worth mentioning is this C# source generator for generating P/Invoke methods for win32 APIs: https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32

Idk what all the hubub is about FolderBrowserDialog, it's pretty easy to make the Win32 calls (you can even code generate the interop calls).

You could try this to auto-generate it.

A quick Google Search netted the following project (https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32). Looks like my evening is gone.

I tried out both TerraFX.Interop.Windows and CsWin32, ultimately settling on the latter. CsWin32 was a little less intimidating as the API is generated based on strings in a text file rather than containing everything at once. Also I like jumping to definition of types to read more and explore APIs etc and doing that to one of the types in the TerraFX library crashed Visual Studio. That's more of a VS problem than a TerraFX library but still - CsWin32 would work great for what I'm doing.

Pick your P/Invoke library of choice. For instance, CsWin32, or if you feel braver and want to go faster, TerraFX.Interop.Windows

A few years back, I wanted to see what you could do if you really used modern C++ with the COM principles. This is what I came up with:

https://github.com/jbandela/cppcomponents

* There is no code generation or IDL files

* Components implement IUnknown

* You can have Constructors and static functions for C++ classes.

* You can take std::vector, std::string, std::tuple as parameters and return them (even if you are using different compilers and standard libraries)

* Cross-platform

You may find https://github.com/jbandela/cppcomponents useful. A portable C++11 library allowing COM components to be created from a C++ library. Note the portable, you can 100% make COM components on POSIX as well.