Setting dllimport programmatically in C#

Question

I am using DllImport in my solution.
My problem is that I have two versions of the same DLL one built for 32 bit and another for 64 bit.

They both expose the same functions with identical names and identical signatures. My problem is that I have to use two static methods which expose these and then at run time use IntPtr size to determine the correct one to invoke.

private static class Ccf_32
{
    [DllImport(myDllName32)]
    public static extern int func1();
}

private static class Ccf_64
{
    [DllImport(myDllName64)]
    public static extern int func1();
}

I have to do this because myDllName32 and myDllName64 must be constant and I have not found a way to set it at run time.

Does anyone have an elegant solution for this so I could get rid of the code duplication and the constant IntPtr size checking.

If I could set the file name, I would only have to check once and I could get rid of a ton of repeated code.

Answer 1

I prefer to do this by using the LoadLibrary call from kernel32.dll to force a particular DLL to load from a specific path.

If you name your 32-bit and 64-bit DLLs the same but placed them in different paths, you could then use the following code to load the correct based on the version of Windows you are running. All you need to do is call ExampleDllLoader.LoadDll() BEFORE any code referencing the ccf class is referenced:

private static class ccf
{
    [DllImport("myDllName")]
    public static extern int func1();
}

public static class ExampleDllLoader
{
    [DllImport("kernel32", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, SetLastError = true)]
    private extern static IntPtr LoadLibrary(string librayName);

    public static void LoadDll()
    {
        String path;

        //IntPtr.Size will be 4 in 32-bit processes, 8 in 64-bit processes 
        if (IntPtr.Size == 4)
            path = "c:/example32bitpath/myDllName.dll";
        else
            path = "c:/example64bitpath/myDllName.dll";

        LoadLibrary(path);
    }
}

Answer 2

You can't do this the way you want. You need to think of the DllImport attribute as metadata that is used at compile time. As a result you can't change the DLL it is importing dynamically.

If you want to keep your managed code targeted to "Any CPU" then you either need to import both the 32-bit and 64-bit libraries wrapped as two different functions that you can call depending on the runtime environment or use some additional Win32 API calls to late-load the correct version of the unmanaged assembly at runtime and additional Win32 calls to execute the required methods. The drawback there is that you won't have compile time support for any of that type of code for type safety, etc.

Answer 3

I know this is a really old question (I'm new - is it bad to answer an old question?), but I just had to solve this same problem. I had to dynamically reference a 32-bit or 64-bit DLL based on OS, while my .EXE is compiled for Any CPU.

You can use DLLImport, and you don't need to use LoadLibrary().

I did this by using SetDLLDirectory. Contrary to the name, SetDLLDirectory adds to the DLL search path, and does not replace the entire path. This allowed me to have a DLL with the same name ("TestDLL.dll" for this discussion) in Win32 and Win64 sub-directories, and called appropriately.

public partial class frmTest : Form
{
    static bool Win32 = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(IntPtr)) == 4;
    private string DLLPath = Win32 ? @"\Win32" : @"\Win64";

    [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    public static extern bool SetDllDirectory(string lpPathName);
    [DllImport("TestDLL.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    static extern IntPtr CreateTestWindow();

    private void btnTest_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        string dllDir = String.Concat(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory(), DLLPath);
        SetDllDirectory(dllDir);

        IntPtr newWindow = CreateTestWindow();
    }
}