Automatically creating C# wrappers from c headers?

Question

Is there a way to automatically create p/invoke wrappers for .net from a c header?

Of course I could create them by hand, but maintaining them would be painful, and I'd probably make a mistake somewhere resulting in hard to debug crashes.

I tried SWIG, but it created full classes where simple structs would be sufficient. Another problem with SWIG is that it requires additional interop code on the c side.

I'd prefer if the output worked on mono too, but that is not necessary.

Another thing I could work with is a program which parses the c header, and creates an output in a nice intermediate format like xml, from which I can create the C# wrapper myself.

Edit:
PInvoke Interop Assistant is what I needed.
There are some small issues with it though:
* It translates "unsigned char*" to string where I'd prefer IntPtr
* It assumes that size_t=int=long=32bit. This is currently true for me, but might not true on every platform.
Is there a clean way to fix that? Else I'll use a bit of find and replace on the c code before converting it.

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly, you're basically asking if there is a way to do what SWIG does.

Of course, you want to do it a bit differently, so one option would be to take the SWIG code and change it to work the way you'd like.

Answer 2

The PInvoke Interop Assistant ought to be a better fit for you, it was specifically designed to work with C code.

Just beware that no tool gives you a 100% guaranteed solution, C declarations are way too ambiguous to guarantee a completely trouble-free result. The trouble is pointers, ubiquitous in C code. There's no way to tell that a pointer is used to read or write memory. Or both. Or who is responsible for releasing the memory that is being pointed-to.