pinvoke VS CsWin32

Hooks are a low-level Win 32 API and are not directly exposed from the BCL, so you either need to write your own P/Invoke code (maybe using something like https://github.com/dotnet/pinvoke)

To add to the pile of solutions for this: https://github.com/dotnet/pinvoke

I'm using the PInvoke libraries (cf. https://github.com/dotnet/pinvoke/). And if my mouse hovers a split of a second over PInvoke.User32 or even worse PInvoke.Kernel32, VS will freeze for 2 minutes trying to render the very big summary of those classes.

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.