Comments on: Disabling and Enabling the Close Button in .NET 2.0 WinForms

By: Ken

Ken — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:50:27 +0000

Here’s what I would do:
1. Put the 3rd party dll into your Windows\System32 directory and register it by running this command:

regsvr32 /i foo.dll

2. Add a reference to the dll via Visual Studio as you normally would. It should create a .NET dll called Interop.foo.dll when building. See my previous post for info for this.
3. Invoke in the code.
4. For deployment, use a Setup Project (vdproj). Add the dll to “System Folder” and register it as vsdrfCOM. Also add your project output (obviously).

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:36:52 +0000

Basically we purchased a 3rd party DLL that manipulates PDFs. I tried some software from Microsoft that is supposed to embed DLLs in the executable but this software did not work due to the fact that the DLL contained unmanaged code.

I also tried a technique that involved treating the DLL as a resource and dynamically loading the assembly with reflection. I forget the specific wall I ran into with this approach but I suspect it was related to security issues.

By: Ken

Ken — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:42:16 +0000

What I’m curious about is what actual problems you were having. Was it the distribution that was the problem or the actual invocation of the 3rd party library during development? What was did this 3rd party software do?

I have an extremely similar scenario that I work with and have solved it on both ends. Let me know!

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:10:15 +0000

Nice tutorial.

Do you know any or all of the implications of using unmanaged code? Recently I was trying to bundle all the files required dlls for a small app I wrote so that it could easily be distributed. Unfortunately it was dependent upon a third party library that had unmanaged code and every technique I read online and tried was unable to embed it.

I am curious what the ramifications are of using unmanaged code.