CsWin32 VS terrafx.interop.windows

If you do have headers, you don't have to write the bindings by hand: https://github.com/dotnet/ClangSharp?tab=readme-ov-file#gene...

Also because this is Windows, there is https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32 already (and adjacent libraries) which rely on the same generator.

I feel that nowadays Rust is the language to go when you are doing system programming, but C# is not a bad choice either. With .NET 9 being released in a few weeks we will get NativeAOT (compilation to a native single binary) for x86 (x64 and ARM64 are already available). At work, I'm writing patches for legacy apps and needed to use C++ for most of my tasks. Nowadays, I'm doing more and more stuff in C# and enjoying it. For WinAPI there is a fantastic cswin32 [1] project that generates FFIs signatures on the fly. And it's fairly simple to extend it for other Windows libraries (I did it for detours [2], for example). And using pointers or working with native memory blocks is straightforward and intuitive for people with C/C++ background.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32

[2] https://lowleveldesign.wordpress.com/2024/07/11/implementing...

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.

My best guess would be to use CsWin32 to wrangle the audio sinks used by variious WASAPI sessions.

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 couple other options than what has been suggested so far: - TerraFX.Interop.Windows. Raw, blittable, 1:1 bindings for all Win32, D2D/D3D11/D3D12 APIs (there's also a version with Vulkan bindings). As close to doing #include as you can get in C#. This is my personal favorite, I use it in my own ComputeSharp library, and transitively we use it in the Microsoft Store too 🙂 - Silk.NET another version of high-performance bindings, more opinionated than TerraFX and with some additional helpers to make it a bit easier to use.

Repo is here: https://github.com/terrafx/terrafx.interop.windows/ Latest NuGet is here: https://www.nuget.org/packages/TerraFX.Interop.Windows

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

I'm using WIC through TerraFX.Interop.Windows in one of my projects, would definitely also recommend that one if anyone's looking for fast, native 1:1 bindings to all these various Win32 APIs.

Literally any direct port of C++ objects (eg. here, here)