Vanara VS terrafx.interop.windows

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

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)