Using Windows LockResource to access binary resource data

Question

First, my concrete question: In my attempt to access cursor raw data, my call to LockResource succeeds, but the SizeOfResource call tells me that the data is only 20 bytes, which is just too small...

What I'm really trying to do: I am exploring possibilities for remoting cursors from mixed code server application to a CLR client application. My (quite possibly naive) idea is to use LockResource to access the binary data of a resource (embedded in a native dll), pass this data to the client and treat it in the same way as resource data that has been retrieved from a local assembly using Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream to get the resource stream and Resources.ResourceSet to iterate through the resources. I am hoping that since .NET no doubt makes the same underlying system calls as native code, this makes sense. On the other hand...

Does anyone have any comments or better ideas ? (It would of course be easier to simply provide a compatible resource package on the client and remote some cursor id, but we seem to have a requirement for cursors to be dynamically added at runtime.)

Any comments gratefully received!

Answer 1

In the end, I used Win32 calls to get at the cursor bitmap, serialised this and the hotspot location to the client, and recreated the cursor there using the Win32 API again. Once you've got an HCURSOR cient-side, you can construct a .NET WinForms Cursor from it if you want (but such an object cannot be serialised using straightforward .NET - otherwise that would have been a much easier way to remote it!).