nomissbowling/legacywrapper

LegacyWrapper uses a x86 wrapper to call legacy dlls from a 64 bit process.

LegacyWrapper

About

LegacyWrapper uses a wrapper process to call dlls from a process of the opposing architecture (X86 or AMD64).

Since you can't load a dll of another architecture directly, the wrapper utilizes a named pipe to abstract the call. You won't notice this though, because all the magic is hidden behind a single static method.

NuGet Package

There is a NuGet package available here: Codefoundry.LegacyWrapper @ nuget.org

Usage

If you want to compile the LegacyWrapper yourself, make sure to place both the wrapper executable, LegacyWrapperClient.dll and LegacyWrapper.Common.dll in your directory.

// Define delegate matching DLL function
private delegate int GetSystemMetrics(int index);

// Create new WrapperClient
// Remember to ensure a call to the Dispose()-Method!
using (var client = new WrapperClient("User32.dll"))
{
    // Make calls providing library name, function name, and parameters
    int x = (int)client.Invoke<GetSystemMetrics>("GetSystemMetrics", new object[] { 0 });
    int y = (int)client.Invoke<GetSystemMetrics>("GetSystemMetrics", new object[] { 1 });
}

The constructor takes an optional second parameter where you can specify the target architecture (it defaults to X86):

using (var client = new WrapperClient(TestDllPath, TargetArchitecture.Amd64))
{
    result = (int)client.Invoke<TestStdCallDelegate>("TestStdCall", new object[] { input });
}

Please note that loading a 64bit dll will only work on 64bit operating systems.

ref parameters

If your delegate contains ref parameters, the object array passed as parameters to the Invoke<T> method will contain the updated values afterwards.

Todo (maybe)

• Support for Attributes like [CallingConvention].
• Type safe usage of generics in Call-Method

Further reading

View this blog post to obtain a basic understanding of how the library works internally. There is also a blog post about the new 64bit feature in LegacyWrapper 2.1.

Contributing

Feel free to submit any suggestions/issues and contribute to LegacyWrapper.

License

Copyright (c) 2017, Franz Wimmer. (MIT License)

See LICENSE for more info.

Credits

This library includes Nuane.Interop written by Lukas Pokorny.