.NET Interoperability at a Glance 1 – Introduction

Read this article in my blog here.

See more Interoperability examples here.

Contents

Contents of this article:

• Contents
• Read also
• Overview
• Introduction
• Summary
• Where to go next

Read also

More from this series:

• .NET Interoperability at a Glance 1 – Introduction
• .NET Interoperability at a Glance 2 - Managed Code Interoperation
• .NET Interoperability at a Glance 3 - Unmanaged Code Interoperation

Overview

In this article and the few following it, we’ll try to take a tour in Interoperability in .NET Framework.

In this lesson, we’ll start by an introduction to the concept of Interoperability. In the next few lessons, we’ll have a look at Interoperability and how it fits into the .NET Framework and other technologies.

Since Interoperability is a very huge topic and cannot be covered in just a few articles, we’ll concentrate on Interoperability in .NET Framework (not any other technologies) and summarize its uses.

Here we go!

Introduction

Let’s get hands on the concept of Interoperability and it’s relation to the .NET Framework.

Concept

Interoperability (reduced to Interop) is the ability of two diverse systems or different systems to communicate (i.e. inter-operate) with each other. When I say ‘two systems’ I assume that the first one is always the .NET Framework, since we are interested in .NET and also the interoperability is a very huge topic and cannot be summarized in just a few articles. The other system might be any other software, component, or service based on any technology other than the .NET Framework. For example, we could interoperate with Win32 API, MFC applications, COM/ActiveX components, and so on.

So we have two different systems, the first is the .NET Framework, while the other is any other technology. Our goal is to communicate with that stranger; that’s the main goal of Interoperability in .NET Framework.

Goals and Benefits

Here comes a question (or a few questions!), why do I need interoperation? Why I do need to communicate with other systems at all? If I need specific features, couldn’t I just use existing functionalities of .NET Framework to accomplish my tasks? I can even redevelop them!

We can summarize the answer of those questions in a few points:

• First, in many cases, you can’t redevelop those components because the functionalities they offer is either very difficult (sometimes impossible) or maybe you don’t sufficient knowledge to redevelop them! Unless if you are very brilliant and have enough knowledge of the Assembly language, you can develop your API that would replace current system API, and then you’ll have also to interoperate with your API to be able to call it from your .NET Framework application.
• If you’re not convinced yet, this is should be for you. You might be not having enough time to redevelop the component that may take a very long time and effort to complete. Imagine how much time would take to code, debug, and test your component. Plus, you can rely on existing components and trust them, many bugs can appear in your code from time to time and you’ll have to fix them all!
• Other 3rd party component might not exist, or maybe the company you work for require you to use such those components.
• You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, do you?

So, including Interop code in your .NET projects is sometimes inevitable (especially when working with Windows API) that you definitely can’t keep yourself away from them.

Summary

So you have now basic understanding of what Interoperability means. As a reminder, Interoperability is the process of two diverse systems communicate with each other. For us, the first system is the .NET Framework. The other system is any other technology (Windows API, MFC, COM/ActiveX, etc.)

You can’t live without Interop, actually you did some interoperation in your work (you may be actually do that every day.)

Now you are ready to take a look at how Interop fits in .NET Framework.

Where to go next

Read more about Interoperability here.

More from this series:

• .NET Interoperability at a Glance 1 – Introduction
• .NET Interoperability at a Glance 2 - Managed Code Interoperation
• .NET Interoperability at a Glance 3 - Unmanaged Code Interoperation