Accessing Microsoft.Win32.UnsafeNativeMethods?

Question

Microsoft has a very nice Windows API wrapper included in .NET framework. It is stored in Microsoft.Win32.UnsafeNativeMethods , Microsoft.Win32.SafeNativeMethods and Microsoft.Win32.NativeMethods .Unfortunately they aren't accessible because they are declared as private. Is there a way of accessing them easily?

Answer 1

Most method definitions in those classes (if not all) are extern declarations with DllImport attributes that refer to functions in the Windows API through P/Invoke. In doesn't matter where these declarations reside. You can create your own class named UnsafeNativeMethods or SafeNativeMethods and put declarations referring to the same Windows API functions in there. You'll find the signatures of many Windows API functions for C# on pinvoke.net .

Answer 2

Most of the functionality contained in these classes is exposed by the .Net framework itself; you should search (or ask here) before making API calls.

To answer your question, no.
The best you can do is to copy them from Reflector or the reference source.

Answer 3

For what it's worth I always thought there should have been a kernel32.interop.dll etc with the static methods already DllImport'ed. But I've resorted to creating my own on an as-needed basis. Over the years I've found I rarely use more than a handful of them but it's such a pain in the ass when I need an API that I haven't imported yet.

Answer 4

The reason could be the security impact of SuppressUnmanagedCodeSecurityAttribute. Check Move P/Invokes to NativeMethods class