Vanara VS CsWin32

I came across Vanara not long ago, very comprehensive library set to avoid importing/declaring everything yourself: dahall/Vanara: A set of .NET libraries for Windows implementing PInvoke calls to many native Windows APIs with supporting wrappers.

This is an advanced concept and should be contemplated if you feel confortable with C# programming. You can extend the Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI). Check the development documentation. Use Vanara to extend the functionality.

I have a lot of C# P/Invoke / interop experience. Almost everything is possible in C#, I swear. Just keep in mind that C/C++ users have Windows.h include (meta-include which references thousands of another useful includes) that contain every single public fuction, structure or enum definition, i. e. you just go ahead and use it (while having to link against necessary libs correctly ofc). When you do the same thing in C# you have to P/Invoke through all this stuff by yourself. Consider taking a look at Vanara.PInvoke (https://github.com/dahall/Vanara), these packages might help you a lot in case you do not want to dive that deep.

Interesting that it was built in .Net and appears to be using WPF with a few improvements[1].

It also refers to Vanara[2] which looks interesting as a safe utility wrapper to the Windows API.

[1]:https://github.com/Kinnara/ModernWpf

[2]:https://github.com/dahall/Vanara

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.