Vortice.Windows VS terrafx.interop.windows

There are quite a lot actually, even if we ignore engines and frameworks (though some of them are quite low level). Some of the biggest are Silk.NET, Vortice.Windows, SharpDX (the last one is dead but it still should work well).

In C#, that means you'll need something like Vortice.Windows or Silk.NET. If you just want WIC (and not a bunch of DirectX stuff, there's also a plain old WIC interop library. And if you don't mind a well-tested, yet end-of-life library, there's SharpDX.

These days, you're better off with Vortice.Windows or Silk.NET.

For those looking for an alternative to SharpDX, Vortice.Windows is an option.

Microsoft has refused to support it. There have been community-made managed wrappers for DirectX, but SlimDX died years ago and SharpDX was abruptly abandoned and its github archived in early 2019. There's a new one called Vortice that seems to be trying to pick up where SharpDX left off.

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)