Completely unexpectedly I stumbled across Platform Invocation Services today when I was introduced to the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager API. It should have been a simple case of getting to know the API and writing a sample application with it, but it turned out that there’s no managed wrapper available for it (in spite of first being told otherwise). Combine that fact with an abundance of low level calls and large structs as their parameters and you can imagine that after one day there’s still a long way to that sample application, not to mention the final solution.

For anybody else like me out there who hasn’t done more than an occasional DllImport call or two the following resources should help getting to grips with the PInvoke basics:

• Platform Invoke Tutorial – a must read for anyone starting with PInvoke. As usual, the follow-up links provide lots of additional useful information.
• PINVOKE.NET – an indispensable source of information on WinAPI PInvoke calls. Not exactly what I needed but still the abundance of example calls turned out helpful.
• The P/Invoke Wizard – a simple tool for converting C/C++ include files to PInvoke declarations. Not perfect and a bit pricy for what it does but still worth it due to the time it can save you when dealing with many large include files.