.NET and COM Interoperability Handbook, The

Advanced Aspects of PInvoke

Although it's not strictly a COM Interop topic, I wanted to end this chapter by discussing some advanced aspects of PInvoke. You learned in Chapter 6 that PInvoke is a technology that allows you to make calls to functions in non-COM, unmanaged DLLs. In this section we will look at the following advanced aspects of PInvoke: Pointers, Callback Functions and Structures.

Pointers

Win32 DLLs that use pointers typically use them in one of 2 ways: (1) to return or receive an array, or (2) to return or receive a structure. We'll start our discussion of pointers by looking at a pair of Win32 API functions that demonstrate each of these usages.

The fourth parameter to the CreateFile function API function takes a pointer to a ...