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CharSet.What?

Thu, October 5, 2006, 02:53 AM under dotNET
This post just serves as a background URL that I can link to from my next post later :)

We all know that to call unmanaged code from managed code you have to pinvoke (i.e. use the DllImport attribute). One of the enumerations that becomes relevant when calling native methods that accept strings is CharSet.

It is also relevant for native structures with strings but I am explicitly ignoring that in this post. I am also ignoring the CharSet.None enumeration as it means the same as CharSet.Ansi and is there for C++ legacy reasons, I think.

CharSet is useful so you can instruct the runtime to invoke the "A" version of an API or the "W" version (Ansi or Unicode) e.g. MessageBoxA or MessageBoxW. If you select CharSet.Ansi the CLR attempts to invoke an entry point with an appended "A" if the entry point specified by the signature doesn't exist. If you select Auto, then on modern OSs it will default to Unicode. This means the CLR will attempt to invoke an entry point with an appended "W" before attempting to invoke the entry point specified by the signature. If you miss the CharSet from your DllImport declaration, the default is Ansi with the behaviour described above.
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