cppcomponents VS CsWin32

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.

jbandela/cppcomponents: Allows you to write binary components in C++11 that can be used across different compilers and standard libraries (github.com)

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.

If all you need is Win32 stuff from a WPF application, you can use P/Invoke to call the unmanaged code from C# (see: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/native-interop/pinvoke). Microsoft also recently added features for making working with Win32 from C# easier (see: https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32).

There's this helpful repo for people trying to P/Invoke WinAPI