Yesterday my two sons – who are now 6 and 4, both great ages – managed to get me to sit (several times, of course) on a whoopee cushion. Which brought back many fond memories of my brother and I playing similar tricks at around that age. What amazed me most was how the technology has advanced: this latest generation of cushion self-inflates! A simple enough innovation – the rubber now contains a small hole and a sponge – but in many ways revolutionary. Ah, if only I had a time machine I could make a small (but very noisy) fortune. :-)
Anyway, enough about that. In today’s post I wanted to share a potentially useful resource that was brought to my attention by Augusto Gonçalves (thanks, Augusto! :-), the Managed Windows API.
Here are excerpts from this site regarding the problem…
If you want use Windows functionality in a .NET application which is not covered by the .NET framework (there is no "managed API" available for it), you usually have to use PInvoke, an interface that allows to invoke raw API functions from C# and VB.NET.
And the solution…
"Managed Windows API" is a collection of C# components that wrap Windows API functionality. It contains those features the author needed for his C# development, but if you have components yourself you want to share, please submit them so that this project can grow.
Before going any further I should state that I haven’t actually tried using this myself – and so cannot comment on its capabilities or quality – but the concept is promising and it’s available with full source code.
If you have any experience with this layer – or take the time to look into – please do post a comment.