Microsoft .NET is a technology that provides a new and improved way of developing software for the Windows platform. Microsoft .NET offers a framework that makes it possible for all applications to interoperate on a single platform.

This book addresses the topic of interoperability of existing code for the Microsoft .NET platform. It offers a recipe for handling programming code in Windows, and consists of nine chapters. Chapters 1 through 3 discuss programming issues related to application programming interfaces. Some examples of the code are shown in these chapters, such as how to catch unmanaged exceptions by writing small C++ wrappers around the managed functions, how to handle exceptions for memory management, and how to replace Win 32 calls with .NET. Chapter 4 is dedicated to interoperability issues for the C++ programming language in Microsoft .NET. Chapters 5 through 7 focus on exposing code using component object model (COM) components, while chapters 8 and 9 focus on COM+ services and transactions.

In Windows, most programming issues are related to dynamic link libraries (DLLs) and platform invocation services (PInvoke). This book presents various ways to handle source code for DLLs and PInvoke. However, readers need to be familiar with programming code used in the book, DLL code and PInvoke code for the Windows platform, and how to use COM and COM+ technologies. Readers must also have a good background in C++, C#, and Visual Basic .NET. This book is recommended to readers, especially developers, who want to learn the technical details about how to interoperate existing code with the Microsoft .NET platform.