C# GUI Frontend

Question

Is is possible to make a GUI in C# but make the actually program in C or C++.

Like say I want to make a chat application. I want the interface to be in C#. But I want to make all the actual code in C. Is this possible?

I found http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=P%2FInvoke&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=

does anyone have any better kind of information?

Answer 1

Absoluely! A c# winform can call into managed or unmaged C or C++ dll's. See P/Invoke for more information.

Edit: Turns out there's a good thread on P/Invoke on the front page. :)

Answer 2

Incrementing on JP's totally correct previous answer, you can also expose your C++ code through COM interfaces and then consume them in C# via COM/Interop. Good luck, though.

Answer 3

Everything you can do in C can be done in managed code. Why do you want to build one component in C# and the other one in C? Are you worried about sockets?

But to your question, you can absolutely do it as JP mentioned above.

Answer 4

Not only is it possible, it might very well be what you should do. There's no reason to rewrite all of your existing code for .NET.

In short, there are three ways to use existing (C/C++) code from C#: for easy access to a few simple APIs, P/Invoke works well. C++/CLI will give you the most flexibility. You third option is to use COM.

Answer 5

Depending on how you want to distribute your application, you should consider the deployment requirements. If you have C++ modules, you will have a dependency on the C++ runtime libraries, in addition to the .Net framework. This is a non-issue if you are merely P/Invoking the Win32 API. This may or may not matter to you, but it mattered to me - I got rid of the C++ layer in my app, and resorted to calling Win32 directly.

Answer 6

You already have some answers here giving you the affirmative.

One suggestion tho: Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or something like that).

Unless you are creating a science project (doing something just to see if it can be done), just write the entire thing in C#. Once complete, if you find you have parts of the project that are not performing well enough, rewrite those parts.

Basically, the part of the application that are slow are rarely where you thing they will be.