Comments on World of coding: Binding C++ APIs, the COM way

The cppinterop essentially supersedes this, suppor...

2011-04-20T13:53:55.814+01:00

The cppinterop essentially supersedes this, supporting interfaces, class instantiation and subclassing. It's still a work in progress, it should be finished in the next few months.

Regarding the mac, there's no support at the moment for name mangling there, if you're targetting non-gcc libraries that won't probably work, and I'm not sure if gcc on the mac is

By start... I very, very sorry about my last comme...

2011-04-18T08:41:53.156+01:00

By start... I very, very sorry about my last comment hehe... I didn't realize that I was talking with a woman instead of a man... I just read the Gaita part of the name... so again, sorry by my mistake! :P

Now looking at your code and the possibilities for the C++ bindings... I am creating bindings for some C++ libraries used in games, like Ogre, OIS, FMod and Bullet...

@Daniel This is all just shuffling pointers aroun...

2011-02-17T16:31:19.873Z

@Daniel

This is all just shuffling pointers around and calling function pointers on vtables, so performance wise it's pretty much the same thing. The performance impact on pinvoke is the need for memory pinning and copying, which also happens here.

Hey man! I liked your post, but I have one questio...

2011-02-04T19:58:38.634Z

Hey man! I liked your post, but I have one question, because I don't know COM very well, so:

What is the performance hit of using a COM interface instead of a p/invoke call?

though i code mostly in C, i enjoy your article mu...

2010-09-15T18:17:00.810+01:00

though i code mostly in C, i enjoy your article much

@Martin: Yes, of course, all wrapper classes need ...

2009-08-07T04:29:28.510+01:00

@Martin:
Yes, of course, all wrapper classes need to be IDisposable, otherwise it's a huge headache. This article doesn't talk about wrapper classes, but I should get around to talking about that one of these days. :P

@andreia: exactly. If the wrapper classes implemen...

2009-08-07T03:08:38.707+01:00

@andreia: exactly. If the wrapper classes implement IDisposable, life in much easier. In an old protect I actually reimplemented MS's tool (tlbimp? Can't remember now) to do exactly that.

I recently came accross your blog and have been re...

2009-08-05T12:23:32.275+01:00

I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Susan

http://8080proxy.com

@AJ: Besides the fact that we're not talking ...

2009-08-04T18:21:21.134+01:00

@AJ:

Besides the fact that we're not talking about OLE anywhere here, that article makes little sense, frankly.

QueryInterface is called to verify that the current object instance can be cast to the type that you're asking it: this is the same dynamic casting concept as typeid/dynamic_cast that you get when you enable rtti on c++, the ability to do reflection on

Interesting and clear, but, how many times are we ...

2009-08-04T17:56:35.527+01:00

Interesting and clear, but, how many times are we going to make the same mistakes with OLE/COM design?

http://www.relisoft.com/Win32/olerant.html

Nice article, but I agree that this needs to be au...

2009-08-04T11:07:39.990+01:00

Nice article, but I agree that this needs to be autogenerated so the SWIG link is very interesting indeed :)

is this possible in mono?? http://www.codeproject....

2009-08-04T06:35:02.530+01:00

is this possible in mono?? http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/DllExporter.aspx

works fine in windows tho...

If anyone wants to earn some Kudos for both the Dr...

2009-08-03T22:03:40.083+01:00

If anyone wants to earn some Kudos for both the Drizzle & Mono communities, there is no C# client for the Drizzle database. It needs hooking up to the C library libdrizzle
https://launchpad.net/libdrizzle

+1 on SWIG, we've used on several large cross ...

2009-08-03T20:03:57.890+01:00

+1 on SWIG, we've used on several large cross platform c++ APIs with the resulting c# wrapper also being cross platform.

@mdi: You can return whatever you want - the limi...

2009-08-03T18:20:54.213+01:00

@mdi:

You can return whatever you want - the limit is the same as for pinvokes, basically, and the same goes for in and out parameters. If what you're returning can't be automatically marshalled, you can always use HandleRef or IntPtr to do manual conversions, just like you would for pinvokes.

Some example code is at

Question: are there any restrictions on what the C...

2009-08-03T18:01:18.424+01:00

Question: are there any restrictions on what the COM exposed APIs have to return?

Do they all have to return some sort of int/HRESULT, or can they return other things like strings and structs?

Would seriously recommend SWIG http://www.swig.org...

2009-08-03T17:11:17.877+01:00

Would seriously recommend SWIG
http://www.swig.org/

We've used it to automatically generate bindings for massive C++ baselines in both Windows and Linux. It takes your C++ header files as input, so as your interface changes, your bindings are automatically updated.

@Martin: I take it you're talking about C# cl...

2009-08-03T16:27:22.736+01:00

@Martin:

I take it you're talking about C# classes that implement and/or store COM interfaces/objects?

@Bert: Yes, you're right, it should return in...

2009-08-03T16:12:32.297+01:00

@Bert:

Yes, you're right, it should return int. When the interface is not supported, the pointer should be set to null, which gives the same behaviour as returning an error code (throws a COMException), so I can get away with not returning it, but returning it allows the exception to have an error code.

Wrt returning 'this', this is a quick and dirty example. It

Also, while you are at it, you can fix Microsoft&#...

2009-08-03T15:53:49.734+01:00

Also, while you are at it, you can fix Microsoft's mistake and make all COM classes implement IDisposable. That way deterministic finalization (key for many COM/C++ classes) can be easily achieved using, well, "using".

In COM QueryInterface returns a result code to all...

2009-08-03T15:06:04.328+01:00

In COM QueryInterface returns a result code to allow checking if the requested interface is really supported. And always returning 'this' will not work for other interfaces than the default interface. (It has to be casted to the interface before returning the reference)