coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[Garrett Serack <garretts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The managed version of the CoApp engine still needs to export C functions from the CoApp-Engine.dll Assembly.

No .NET language supports exporting C style functions from the assembly, yet .NET does, if you use ILASM and hand code it to do that.  A couple years ago I built a tool to automatically do that using an Attribute (which I ever-so-cleverly called DllExport), and a command line tool to write the fixups.

The tool generates a .NET assembly that has the exports, and forwards the C call on to the managed static function.

By default, the tool takes a given .NET assembly (foo.dll) with functions marked with DllExport , it generates a companion assembly ($foo.dll). You can even debug straight from native to managed and back to native without doing anything special.

For a release build, the tool can merge the fixups right into the target DLL--so that foo.dll itself has the C functions exported.

It even supports callback functions (implemented as delegates in c#)

The tool is part of my gsToolkit I wrote: http://gstoolkit.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=DllExport&referringTitle=Home


public class CoAppEngine{

   public delegate int ResolveCallback(string packageName, string localPath, string url);

   [DllExport("coapp_resolve")]
   public static int MyFunction(string packagePath, ResolveCallback callback) {
      callback("foo", "bar", "http://foo";);
     return 0;
   }
}

and you can see the results:


C:\root\projects\CoApp\output\any\debug\bin>dumpbin /exports $coapp-engine.dll

Dump of file $coapp-engine.dll
File Type: DLL
  Section contains the following exports for $coapp-engine.dll
    00000000 characteristics
    4C780756 time date stamp Fri Aug 27 11:43:34 2010
        0.00 version
          0 ordinal base
           1 number of functions
           1 number of names

    ordinal hint RVA      name

          0    0 0000227E coapp_resolve


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Garrett Serack | Microsoft's Open Source Software Developer | Microsoft Corporation
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I don't make the software you use; I make the software you use better on Windows.