Essential C# 6.0

20. Platform Interoperability and Unsafe Code

C# has great capabilities, particularly when paired with the .NET libraries. Sometimes, however, you do need to escape out of all the safety that C# provides and step back into the world of memory addresses and pointers. C# supports this action in four ways. The first option is to go through Platform Invoke (P/Invoke) and calls into APIs exposed by unmanaged DLLs. The second way is through unsafe code, which enables access to memory pointers and addresses. The third approach—although specific to Windows 8 or newer—is through the Windows Runtime (WinRT) API, which is exposing more and more of the operating system functions and making them directly available in C# 5.0 or higher. The last way, which ...