How to use a .NET DLL from Win32?

[A Nonymous]

The company I work produces a couple of Win32 applications. Lately there
has been a lot of interest in porting some of our apps to smart phones and
Win CE devices. Basically the .NET Compact Framework.

It looks to me like the only viable development environment for .NET CF is
C#. I tried the Delphi CF helper thing and it is interesting but IMHO not
quite ready for "prime time".

Anyhow, rewriting any of our major apps in C# is out of the question. The
visual components are quite sparse and make me feel like I've set the way
back machine for 20 years ago. On the other hand it doesn't look too bad
for some of the low level, non visual objects. I think I can convert most
of our core objects that encapsulate the majority of our business rules
without too much trouble.

I did a test and was able to create a .NET DLL and a test app that used the
DLL in C# for my smart phone. Actually it was pretty easy, and I did it
before I realized that .NET CF would be a problem for some of the larger
apps.

For the smart phone I am going o have to use C# and .NET CF, but this will
also be a limited subset of our main app. I just don't want to maintain 2
code bases for the core objects, so, I got the idea that perhaps I could
put the core objects (non visual) in a .NET CF DLL, and use the same DLL
for the PC app and the smart phone app.

So far my attempts have been unsuccessful, but I am hoping someone here can
point me to some information or an example of how to use a .NET DLL from a
Win32 application.

Sorry for the LONG explanation, but I wanted to show my thought process
just incase someone had an alternate suggestion.

Thanks in advance,
A.

[Vertuas]

Hello,

I was recently in a similiat situation to yourself. We outsourced some work
and got a .NET dll back!

We mainly use Delphi 7 for developement, mainly because it cost us a fortune
and haven't needed .net, so didn't upgrade. We have been forced to upgraded
and purchase a licence for delphi 2005.

In delphi 2005, it took me a little while to figure out how to impost the
.NET dll, but once i did i was amazed how easy it was.

Note : your project needs to be a .NET based project!

Place the requuired DLL in your project folder. Next go to project menu and
choose Import. When the fileopen dialog appears, navigate to you project
fold and change the file filter to .dll.

Click open.

Delphi will import the .NET dll into you project.

Even though your project is a Delphi .NET project, you can still use all of
the win32 API units, so you should be able to use you old code aswell. The
annoting thing is that you cannot import .NET DLLs into windows 32 based
projects!

Hope this helps you

Vertuas

"A Nonymous" <anon...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:Xns990A6F30B747Da...@207.105.83.66...

[Unknown]

Using a .NET dll in a win32 app is called CLR Hosting. Just search this
on google on you'll find a lot of papers and samples.

--
OD