NyteOwlDave

Just some stuff from my brain and whatever... ;)

[nyteowldave]

Business Closing

NyteOwl Consulting has been closed. We still maintain the name for the sake of continuity.

[nyteowldave]

Dave Wellsted (NyteOwl)

About Dave

[nyteowldave]

I’ve just regained access to my blog. Cool! :)

[nyteowldave]

How do I invite people to the DropBox for Homer Methodist?

Click this link:

Homer Methodist Projects

[nyteowldave]

Calling the Win32 API from Visual Basic .NET

I've recently been developing software for the new recycling business and came across the need to make a call to the operating system. Well that's simple enough. Just use the System.Runtime.InteropServices namespace and a few attributes and there you go, right?

Well it took me several attempts to get it right. After several tests resulting in exceptions being thrown that griped about corrupt memory and so on, I finally made it work. So here's an example of a VB.NET module that just makes a single call to the GetShortPathNameW() function in Kernel32.dll

Imports System.Runtime.InteropServices Public Module FileSystemModule   <DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet:=CharSet.Unicode)>   Private Function GetShortPathNameW    (<MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)>     longName As String,     <MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)>     shortName As String,     ByVal byteCount As Integer)   As Integer   End Function   Function GetShortPathName(pathName As String)   As String     Dim count = 1024     Dim shortPath As String = ""     For n = 1 To count       shortPath += Chr(0)     Next     GetShortPathNameW(pathName, shortPath, count)     Return shortPath   End Function End Module