Excellent companion piece to Adam Nathan's bible...
Rating:
5 / 5
If you are doing .NET -> Native interop., this book should pretty have almost all that you need. Note that it does not cover COM (RCW) interop in that much detail and does not talk about CCW (COM -> .NET). However, the coverage of MarshalAs() and the clever examples that show how to deal with the complex DirectX structures are alone worth the price of admission.
What I liked best was the author didn't take the cop out solution (managed C++) unless it was absolutely necessary. Most of the code examples in the book are in C# and this might be of some concern to the VB.NET programmers. The chapters are well organized and there's an appendix with 50+ good tips on PInvoke. If you are still struggling with your PInvoke interop problem after reading this book, it's time to bring out the heavy weight (Adam Nathan's bible) -- good luck!!!
Atul
Excellent guide to get started using the Win32 API w/ .NET
Rating:
5 / 5
I am an intermediate programmer, who in the past, has done some Visual Basic 6 and Win32 API integration programming. After learning VB.NET and C#, I found that the .NET Framework was missing some functionality of the Win32 API, which surprised me a little since Microsoft is really pushing .NET as the "API" of choice for developers.I agree with the book that the .NET Framework is mostly targeted at business developers and the Internet for B2B and B2C applications, as well as internal Enterprise applications. Having said that, I have found the .NET framework lacking, and as the author points out, most likely due to how young it is in comparison to the Win32 API. This book will get you up and running with making those Win32 API calls when you can't find that same functionality duplicated in the .NET Framework. There isn't much documentation on this subject matter on MSDN or the web (searching on Google), so this is pretty much it. The author did a great job, however, at times, the examples were a little light or topics weren't explained as thoroughly as they should have been. For example, the author will tell you what data type he used in place of a native Win32 data type, but doesn't clearly explain his reasoning for the choice. But other than that small complaint, this book is a must have for any .NET developer.
This book Rocks
Rating:
5 / 5
Let's face it, .NEt is really cool, but it isn't a finished product. For everything else, there's this book. He has some Great examples and explains everything amazingly well. I'm a book junkie and this is definitely one of the best books I've come across recently. I think this book would be a tremendous asset to anyone who wants to learn how to get around .NET's current limitations.
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