I have some .dll native C++ programs which mainly return int/double values, array structures and string values. These values should be taken by a Web Service program made in C#.
I would like to know if it is really necessary to modify my C++ programs and adapt to Web service, i.e. return values such as a XML string/file together with a XSD string,/file. Personally I think I should not modify them because I think C# can receive C++ values using interop and easily serialize using components of .Net library.
However, I would like to receive comments about the best, fast and effective way to pass C++ values to a Web Service.
Thanks!!
I think you can do it as you stated.
In the past, I achieved the same or similar by writing a C++/CLI wrapper around my native classes and consumed those from C#. This didn't incur the overhead of C# interop, which I've noticed can be quite expensive.
I think P/Invoke is what you want here. It will allow you to pass your simple and composite types between managed and unmanaged code, and you won't have to write any C++/CLI wrapper assemblies.
This (MSDN) is a good start for P/Invoke. If you scroll down here's a section called 'Specifying Custom Marshaling for User-Defined Structs'. This will allow you to pass your user-defined structs back and forth.
Look up MarshallAs and you can see all the primitive native types you can marshall. The DllImport attribute is something you will want to search for as well.
If performance becomes an issue, I would recommend serializing/deserializing into either named pipes or a local socket, but I'm not totally clear on the performance chararistics there. Good Luck!
The best, fastest, most efficient and effective way to expose your C++ application as a web service is to put C++ web service code on top of it.
See GSoap for a very fast, open source, implementation - one that is 3-5 times faster than the .NET and Java equivalents.
As long as you can return it to C#, C# should be able to return it from a web service. You should not have to do any manual serialization at all.
If you choose to go the serialization route you might want to look at 'thrift' (http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/).
From the website:
Thrift is a software framework for
scalable cross-language services
development. It combines a software
stack with a code generation engine to
build services that work efficiently
and seamlessly between C++, Java,
Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl,
Haskell, C#, Cocoa, Smalltalk, and
OCaml.
Originally developed at Facebook,
Thrift was open sourced in April 2007
and entered the Apache Incubator in
May, 2008.
Related
Is it even possible to create GUI layer in C# and rest of application in C++? If I am not wrong one of antyvirus software had GUI made in Delphi. How it could be done ?
You have several options for doing it, including:
Use P/Invoke to call into the C++ DLL from C#.
Expose a COM interface from the native code, and call it from C# using COM interop.
Write a native Windows service and call into it from managed code.
Use C++/CLI to write a managed library in C++, which you can easily link to from C#.
If you're starting from scratch, option 4 is probably your best option. (Aside from just writing the whole thing in C#, that is.) The first three options all involve some additional wrangling and overhead, and probably aren't worth the hassle if you don't have a compelling reason such as needing to interact with an existing native library or having some need for a service-oriented architecture.
If you write your business logic in C++/CLI, and your UI in C#, it shouldn't be a problem. If you want to write in pure ANSI C++, you might have to write C++/CLI wrappers around the objects you want to expose to C#.
write the app logic in c++ dll, then use pinvoke from c# to talk to the dll.
See this answer. It seems to answer your problem
Can a C# app create objects defined in Java .class files?
Is any interop between C# and Java possible, with C# as the host language?
What you are looking for is a combination of PInvoke and JNI.
You will have to create classes in Java. Expose them via JNI. Access these through PInvoke in C#. You have a to and fro communication between C# to Java.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PInvoke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Native_Interface
If you need direct instantiation you need JNBridge otherwise you can expose the Java program as a server and communicate with any RPC technology (TCP, http etc.)
I have used IKVM in the past. It works well for large projects, but might be too much for you. It all depends on where you're going with this. But if you want complete interop it's worth looking into.
Otherwise, if you an expain your intentions better someone might have a better idea.
I need to port a C/C++ unmanaged project (VS 2008) to C# (preferably .net 3.5).
Are there any conversion-helping
tools; let's say something
translating the code syntax and
asking you verifications/modifications for each
problematic point (I guess I'm dreaming...)
Where can I find some useful howtos or articles about this translation.
They would be very useful if they contained specific hints like:
extern variables should be set in public static classes
(I don't know, I'm guessing...)
Please no suggestion like "You can call your c++ dll from .net", because I know it's possible, but just I can't.
Note:
The C/C++ project uses only STL and
other basic functions, no 3rd Party
libraries etc.
I can't use it directly or wrapped
from C# because our company needs to
mantain/modify the code and we're extremely
more skilled in C# than in C++.
It will cost you far more to convert it than to wrap it and pay a freelancer (like me) to help you out by changing the C++ code for you every few months (or every few years) when you need to make a change. There are some mechanical approaches but the bigger issue is that you can never really be sure that the new C# code does exactly what the old C++ code did. I have clients who have tried this and most gave up and threw the work away. The ones who succeeded did it very slowly, like this:
First, you wrap the old library and get your UI or whatever the new code is (web service, whatever) successfully calling the old library. This gets everyone some "bang for the buck" and buys you time to solve the "we can't maintain our old code" problem. You also develop a comprehensive test suite that proves what the old library does for various edge cases and strange things that only happen in the wild every few years. Over time, you move functionality from the old library into a new C# one and change the calling code to use the new library for that functionality. You move the most volatile parts, the things you change most often, out first. At every stage you run the test cases again to make sure your translation from C++ to C# didn't mess up the results it calculates. Maybe some of it you never move out, maybe in the end it is all moved. You stop when you feel the risk of being unable to maintain your own library and needing to pay someone to do it for you has dropped below the cost of continuing to translate it.
I recommend you have access to someone with good C++ skills when you start. You will probably run into things that don't make much sense to you. But you can get the value from the library pretty quickly, and still solve your underlying problem in the long term.
Depends on what you mean by port.
You can rewrite some of the stuff in C#. Not everything. Some HW or legacy libraries would have to be handled with C/C++ even if you port your own code. I don't know of any reliable automatic converter for C++->C#, and I doubt one can exist.
A better idea may be to wrap your existing code in new C# code. You could create an interop layer in C++/CLI, for example. Or you can communicate with your native code with something like Google Protocol Buffers, if you don't want to mix native/managed code in the same process.
I doubt code conversion tools would help. If you need to make some C++ work in some fashion with .NET, the easiest way is to write a managed C++ layer that wraps it and provides an interface for .NET apps to work with. But it depends on the code.
What is the purpose of rewriting and what does your code do? Does it interface with other components? Does it have a GUI? Is it a standalone executable or a library? Is it a COM / ActiveX server or does it use COM components? Does it link to other DLLs or use 3rd party libraries?
All these affect how you're going to port / rewrite from scratch your app. For example, if your code is an MFC app you may as well forget trying to salvage much code. If your app does http / high level networking stuff you may as well write from scratch. If your code low level you might have to refactor with some C# and some C++ accessible through a managed C++ layer.
Lots of choices and it really depends what your app is doing, how it was written etc.
We've written a Java program which we are looking to use and interact with from C#. What are our options? Optimally it would be possible to compile the Java application as a library (.DLL) that we could reference from C# perhaps using P/Invoke. This, however, doesn't appear to be an option according to the first few searches online.
We opt to be able to use ASP.NET to built a search engine powered by the Java code, so if this opens up for any other options please let us know.
Sorry, you cannot call java code / classes Directly from C# code.
One way of doing this is to wrap up your java classes in a java Web Service and call classes indirectly through that web service interface in your C# code.
Another way is using
javareg.exe which exposes java classes as COM. You can find it at following location:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft VisualStudio\VIntDev98\bin\javareg.exe
Following posts might help as well
Calling Java Classes Directly from
.NET (uses runtime bridge)
Calling Java from Microsoft.NET
The simplest approach would probably be to publish the functionality of your java library as web services and add a web-reference from your asp.net application.
Java isn't meant to be embedded in another program, so you need a bridge. The most simple solution is to use a socket: Create a Java process which listens for commands on a socket. In the C#, send the commands to the socket and read the answers.
The main problem here is serialization but if you use XML, it's not such a big pain anymore. Try the built-in XML serialization (see this article) or custom frameworks like XStream or Simple.
It is certainly possible to wrap Java in a .dll, and has been a part of the core Java platform for over 10 years. JNI (Java Native Interface) has an interface for embedding a JVM in your code, meaning you can run Java classes using C-style linking. Note that this will require that you write a simple C wrapper, there are samples within:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jni/html/invoke.html#11202
As some of these other posts suggest, sometimes it's desirable to be less tightly coupled, so you may want to consider using another design. One option would be a simple database, where the Java application regularly polls for requests from the C# code. If you want tighter coupling, for things like call-backs, you can look at distributed interfaces.
I am used to writing C# Windows applications. However, I have some free hosted PHP webspace that I would like to make use of. I have a basic understanding of PHP but have never used its object-oriented capabilities.
Is there an easy way to convert C# classes to PHP classes or is it just not possible to write a fully object-oriented application in PHP?
Update: There is no reliance on the .NET framework beyond the basics. The main aim would be to restructure the class properties, variable enums, etc. The PHP will be hosted on a Linux server.
PHP doesn't support enums, which might be one area of mismatch.
Also, watch out for collection types, PHP despite it's OO features, tends to have no alternative to over-using the array datatype. Check out the sections on the PHP manual on iterators if you would like to see beyond this.
Public, protected, private, and static properties of classes all work roughly as expected.
A huge problem would be to replicate the .Net Framework in PHP if the C# class usses it.
It is entirely possible to write a PHP application almost entirely in an object-oriented methodology. You will have to write some procedural code to create and launch your first object but beyond that there are plenty of MVC frameworks for PHP that are all object-oriented. One that I would look at as an example is Code Igniter because it is a little lighter weight in my opinion.
I don't know about a tool to automate the process but you could use the Reflexion API to browse your C# class and generate a corresponding PHP class.
Of course, the difficulty here is to correctly map C# types to PHP but with enough unit testing, you should be able to do what you want.
I advice you to go this way because I already did a C# to VB and C++ conversion. That was a pain but the result was worth it.
If the problem is that you want to transition to PHP and you are happy to continue running on a windows server with .NET support you might consider wrapping your code using swig.
This can be used to generated stubs to execute from php and you can then go about rewriting the .NET code into PHP in an incremental fashion.
This works for any of the supported languages. ie. you could incrementally rewrite an application in c++ to java if you really wanted to.