Platform Invocation Services, commonly referred to as P/Invoke, is a feature of Common Language Infrastructure implementations, like Microsoft's Common Language Runtime, that enables managed code to call native code.
When using P/Invoke, the CLR handles DLL loading and conversion of the unmanaged previous types to CTS types (also referred to as parameter marshalling)[1]. To perform this, the CLR:
- Locates the DLL containing the function.
- Loads the DLL into memory.
- Locates the address of the function in memory and pushes its arguments onto the stack, marshaling data as required.
P/Invoke is useful for using standard (unmanaged) C or C++ DLLs. It can be used when a programmer needs to have access to the extensive Windows API, as many functions provided by the Windows libraries lack available wrappers. When a Win32 API is not exposed by the .NET framework the wrapper to this API must be written manually.
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