Need a good book(s) and information about working with unmanaged code and COM with .Net

Question

I have been working with .Net since VS2002 and since then any time that I had to work with COM or unmanaged code has been a pain. I've succeeded doing what was expected but almost always doing a trial-error procedure.

I've had enough of this and I want to know what's going on at the back room and understand how those things work.

As usual, I've searched the Internet and only found small, task oriented information. What I'm looking for is the architecture of the whole thing to be able to understand the concept, not to know how to do one thing.

If you know some book that is good or a great page please let me know. Knowing where I can take a course will be even better!

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

MSDN would be a good start: COM Interop, PInvoke.net is a good resource for signatures (it's not always 100% correct, but it's a wiki).

If you really use P/Invoke a lot, you should read .NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide.

I also use the PInvoke Interop Assistant to get the signatures.