Customer Reviews

.NET Framework Solutions: In Search of the Lost Win32 API

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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A book that is definitely worth its weight. Any developer who is using VB. NET or C#, and requires the difficult knowledge on accessing the WIN 32API for Component writing, DirectX or Security (etc, etc), will find this book invaluable.

About two months ago I decided never to purchase another developer book again, because I'm sick and tired of paying good money for books whose content has just been copied and pasted from the Microsoft Help. However I recently went against my morals because of my struggling efforts in accessing Win 32 API calls from VB .NET. I ended-up getting a copy of John Mueller's "In Search of the Lost Win32 API" book and I'm happy I did.

This book contains original content with many gems of detail on almost every page. From reading the book it soon becomes apparent that John Mueller has a serious Windows and software development detailed background, and he is able to express his thoughts and reasons well. All in a well constructed and very readable manner. The book contains many examples, and most examples show how the same task is done in VB .NET and also C#. He also presents reasons why one language may be better than another for particular types of API calls. He does not however sell the merits of C# above VB.NET or vice versa. What this book is able to do is to give you the options and recommendations so that when you make a decision, it is an informed decision. For example if you ever attempted to replicate a Win32 API union or old variable type structure with VB.NET or C# then you will realise just how difficult or impossible this task is. John Mueller recommends that you use Visual C++ .NET to write a wrapper DLL. He is also tactful to remind us that using Visual C++ .NET will introduce other new challenges, since Visual C++ .NET is a more involved environment. Again examples of the latter are presented.

Should you buy this book I would strongly recommend that you read chapters 1 to 5 first and then read the appendices. The appendices contain over 50 life-saving tips for accessing the WIN32 API. You will most likely find yourself reading these chapters twice because the subject is so detailed!

All in all this is a great book, and am happy to recommend it to any serious developer. David Selwood.

This is a great book for developers seeking to understand how to translate C++ datatypes in the Win32 API functions into C# and VB.NET. It's not in-depth like Dan Appleman's VB's Guide to the Win32 API in past years, but it's the first of its' kind for .NET. My only wish is that the author not have spent so much time on DirectX and instead provided more general examples of other API calls. DirectX coverage should have been left for another book aimed specifically at that technology.

I am in the process of writing code to communicate with a microcontroler chip via USB. This requires calling the Win32 DeviceIoControl function to pass the requests to the device driver. Each USB funtion requires different data structures to be passed and returned using DeviceIoControl. These data structures use many of the wierd data types that Microsoft has defined in the Win32 API, which makes it dificult to write code in C# using Platform Invoke.

This book dosn't cover DeviceIoControl, or USB, but it has all the techniques I need to solve this problem, and has saved many hours of my time. I was starting to think that I would have to write my USB code in C++ with a managed C++ wrapper, but I am now making progress writing it completly in C#.

This book also discusses how to use managed C++ to wrap API calls, when you need to do something which can't be done directly with Platform Invoke.

There are 4 chapters on using DirectX from .NET, which I havn't read yet.

A great book for C# & VB.NET programmers who need to use the Win32 API, or other DLLs. You need to know C#, VB.NET, or another .NET language before reading this book. It also helps if you have had some experience with the Win32 API using C++ or VB6.

This book doesn't describe every Win32 API call in detail, but I don't think any single book could. What it does is provide examples of every Win32 API call type. When I needed to find some code for a callback, this book showed how to do it in detail with functional code, not the code snippets that so many books need. When I needed to write code for the serial port, this book helped too. In fact, I haven't found a single Win32 API need so far that this book doesn't answer with actual code.

The author provides code in both VB and C#, so I don't even have to translate anything. He has taken care of this need nicely. Better yet, the code comes on a CD packed with utilities that are actually demonstrated in the book. In short, unlike shovelware that I have had to wade through in the past, this book has a CD with utilities that actually complement the book content (imagine that).

If you think like me that Microsoft left too many Win32 API calls out of the .NET Framework, this book goes a long way toward making life easier.

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

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.

Darko Martinović
Croatia

This is book, I was looking for. According MSDN, Microsoft does not cover api access in the future. This book will help you if you are interesting in programming hardware specific devices or if you would like to control api behavioure.
Great book!

This book covers everything I anticipate needing to use .NET with my existing applications. The book discusses everything from how to work with data structures to how to create callback routines. The author hasn't covered every Win32 API call, but has provided techniques that should work with every Win32 API call. I found all of the instructions clear and easy to understand. All of the example code that I've tested works great and is fully documented. I was happy to see that the author provides a lot of coding examples. He even includes a lot of extra fully documented source code examples that couldn't fit into the book for one reason or another. Most amazing of all, this is one author who actually answers email. I had some questions and received an answer within a day.

.Net Framework Solutions is a very useful resource for those .Net developers (using C# or VB.Net) who want to access the Win32 api from their .Net programs.A no of working examples (with source code available on accompanying CD) and lucid writing style makes this book a pleasure to read and can be very useful to avoid the traps in calling Win32 API. This book assures that you are not stuck with some problem because the .Net Framework does not provide support(which still lacks support for a no of Win32 APIs.)

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.