How do I get started writing a .Net-wrapper around C++ Omniorb-stubs

Question

Hello there,

my job is to access a CPRBA-server-application from .NET 3.5. After evaluating projets like IIOP.Net (undefined state) and products like VisiBroker (expensive) I'd like to do it "by myself" and write a .Net-Wrapper around C++-Stubs generated my Omniidl (the Omniorb IDL to C++ generator). This means writing some kind of layer of managed code (CLI) around the unmanaged C++ code.

My question is: Has anyone experience in this topic? I honestly don't know how to do it the best way. Right now I plan to create a managed class for every unmanaged class, each managed class itself has a member to an instance of the unmanaged class, which is not garbage-collected. Is this the right way to do it or am I on the wrong path?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

From my experience this is one way to solve this problem - for every unmanaged class write a wrapper .NET class. You should look into using code generation so that you wouldn't need to write a lot of code.

Another option is to create .NET wrappers around common functionality - you could reduce some of the work by using a facade - if you have several classes that you need for a single operation or a group of operations you can create a single .NET class that manages all of them.