Summary

Now that the .NET Framework has been around for over four years, the need to mix managed and unmanaged code has greatly diminished. However, there are still plenty of cases where developers need to access COM objects from within the .NET Framework as well as a need to access .NET components from COM clients. In addition to COM InterOperability, this chapter covered some of the details involved in working with unmanaged DLLs using the Platform Invoke features such as the DllImport attribute and the Marshal.GetDelegateFromFunctionPointer method that enable easy and straightforward access to unmanaged APIs such as the Win32 API. This chapter isn't the complete source of information on COM and Windows InterOp; however, after completing this chapter you should feel comfortable enough with the concepts and code surrounding Interoperability that you can make use of it in your own projects.