The answer to my question may already be out there, but I am having no success synthesizing the data into a coherent solution. Your advice is appreciated.
I am writing a "User Control" application using Visual Basic (.NET 3.5) and Visual Studio 2012. I have been given a DLL file which contains functionality that I must access. Additionally, I have been given corresponding .LIB and .H files, which I am told will be necessary to properly make use of the DLL. I believe the DLL was written in C.
I have also been provided with some older VB code which is said to make use of the DLL's functions one that DLL is "included" (or something) in the project. As you can probably tell, my grasp on this is tenuous at best. Here is the VB code:
Private Declare Function SF_AddToCommandQueue Lib "SFrmUt80.dll" Alias "_SF_AddToCommandQueue@8" _
(ByVal CmdCode As Integer, ByVal strParam As String) As Boolean
Private Declare Function SF_FlushCommandQueue Lib "SFrmUt80.dll" Alias "_SF_FlushCommandQueue@4" _
(ByVal strWindowTitle As String) As Boolean
Private Declare Function SF_GetUserName Lib "SFrmUt80.dll" Alias "_SF_GetUserName@8" _
(ByVal strBuffer As String, ByVal BufferSize As Integer) As Integer
Private Declare Function SF_GetUserID Lib "SFrmUt80.dll" Alias "_SF_GetUserID@0" _
() As Integer
Private Declare Function SF_GetCmdType Lib "SFrmUt80.dll" Alias "_SF_GetCmdType@0" _
() As Integer
Private Declare Function SF_GetCmdFilename Lib "SFrmUt80.dll" Alias "_SF_GetCmdFilename@8" _
(ByVal strBuffer As String, ByVal BufferSize As Integer) As Integer
Private Declare Function SF_GetRegisteredMsg Lib "SFrmUt80.dll" Alias "_SF_GetRegisteredMsg@0" _
() As Integer
Hoping this is not too vague, I am wondering how I go about integrating this DLL file into my solution, so that I may make use of its functionality in VB .NET.
Your wisdom is very much appreciated. Thank you!
The .H-files won't be of much use to you, as you don't use them in the managed environment. You would actually just include the DLLs into your solution (i.e. add them to the project in the Solution-Explorer).
VS does the rest for you, all you need to do is, as you already did, declare the functions from the library in your source-code and call the functions.
On MSDN there is an article on this.