Adam Nathan's Old Blog

The following C# code has the goal of enabling managed code to call CreateDC , but it's incorrect. Calling all Interop aficionados... Can you see what's wrong? using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; internal class DeviceContext...

Version 1.1 of the .NET Framework introduces a handy feature called Customer Debug Probes (CDP). These probes enable you to find and diagnose difficult bugs lurking in managed code, even in a production environment. I'll share the details of each probe...

Defining a PInvoke signature and using DllImportAttribute correctly can be difficult to do, and you normally get little-to-no diagnostic information if you make a mistake. Some mistakes that can be made with PInvoke would be impossible for the CLR to...

Tomorrow morning I'm headed for Dallas, Texas to speak at TechEd 2003. Sonja Keserovic and I are giving the following talk: Interoperating with Unmanaged Code (DEV341) Room: D166 Time Slot: Wed, June 4 10:15 AM-11:30 AM Moving to the .NET Framework...

IDL has a size_is attribute (as well as length_is, first_is, last_is, max_is, ...) that decorates a C-style array with enough information for it to be marshaled. Without such an attribute, the array would not be distinguishable from a pointer to a single...

I've fixed this posting, so read on!

Tuesday's quiz used character arrays to represent string fields of the DEVMODE structure. Why not define them as strings, which would be more convenient to manipulate in managed code? If you define a structure field as a string, it is marshaled as...

As promised, here's my first entry with more details about Customer Debug Probes and CLR SPY. The Marshaling probe is the easiest one to understand and great for experimentation since it's the only one that doesn't report on error/warning conditions...