Load multiple copies of dll in same process

Question

I have a dll produced by a third party that has some sort of internal datastructure that limits it's size to X elements.

So basically, it has a Queue with X as the limit.

Now from what I've known DLL's are per process, but is it possible to load a DLL more than once? Maybe per thread? In C#? or in C++/CLI?

I'm trying to load a native c++ dll.

Answer 1

The only way you can do it is by having multiple copies of the same dll, and then load them dynamically.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, the NT core DLL loader routines don't expose a public interface to skip the pool of already-loaded DLLs. As such, you're left with just a few choices:

• Copy, hardlink, symlink, and/or use reparse points to fool the loader into thinking you have multiple distinct DLLs.
• Use multiple processes, and load one DLL per process.
• Write a new DLL loader (very much not for the faint of heart!)
• Convince the DLL's vendor to fix it (likely to be harder than writing a DLL loader :)