private deployment of SQL CE & accesss from unmanaged code. Possibel?

Marshaling is an important part of .NET interop. It allows you to call into unmanaged code from managed code. This column will help you get started.

Yi Zhang and Xiaoying Guo

MSDN Magazine January 2008

There are plenty of times when you need to get information on running processes, not the least of which is during performance tuning. Using the techniques in this article and special .NET classes you'll see how to get a process' ID, name, priority, number of threads, kernel handle, and memory consumption, as well as its user-mode, kernel-mode, and total elapsed running time and put them to use in a custom app called AssemblyBrowser.

Christophe Nasarre

MSDN Magazine October 2004

Throughout this issue, you'll read all about the promise of Web Services and how the .NET Framework enables Web Service development. Many people will also be building their Web Services atop C++ code and frameworks like ATL Server, particularly when performance is paramount. In this article, the authors show how fully functional Web Services are built using ATL Server and Visual Studio .NET. Beginning with unmanaged C++ classes, they add ATL attributes that make the code work over HTTP.

Kirk Fertitta and Chris Sells

MSDN Magazine December 2002

I am developing a c# application that needs to calls functions from a c header file. I use

[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("xxx.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl, ExactSpelling = true,SetLastError=true)]
        public static extern Byte xxxx(IntPtr hResourceContext, ushort xxxx, ref structa aaa,ref Result_struct Result, Byte b);

to import the dll method. When I call this method in C#, the application simply exits without throwing an exception or error. I've used similar approach for other methods from the same dll which involves passing nested structs as parameter and they work fine. I would like to know how I can debug the code/ catch errors/exceptions from the unmanaged code.

I tried to include the SetLastError=true during DllImport but it does not help.

Thanks!

Hi,

when we compile our vb.net or c#.net code (say in a simple console application) then in bin\Debug folder a .exe file is created.Is that a managed code? when i directly execute this file,will this target CLR ? or will it directly run on OS ?

Why there is ConsoleApplication1.vshost.exe.manifest files created in that folder ?

What is .pdb file ?

That executable file is also created in obj\Debug folder .Why ?

I have a C# program that at some point calls 2 functions from an unmanaged dll using p/invoke.  Everything works fine when I'm running in a console app.  When I compile the same program as a windows service and run it, it crashes.  The console app and service should be identical as far as my code is concerned... all either program does is create an object from another assembly of mine and run a Start() method on it.

I have used VS2010 to debug the managed and unmanaged code, and when I step through the Console app everything looks great.  When I attach the debugger to the service, i can step through the first function in the unmanaged code, control returns to the managed code, and then later when it comes to the point where it calls the second unmanaged function, the process terminates immediately before the debugger steps into the first line of unmanaged code.  There are no exceptions that I can see, and the only thing written to the event log is the generic "service terminated unexpectedly" message.  Running "sc query" on the command line lets me know the win32_exit_code is 1067.

Im running everything in .net 4, on winxp 32bit.  The serivce is running as Local System ideally, but the same behavior exists when I run it under my user account. 

I want to deploy applications that use Private Deployment for SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2 for Windows Mobile.
I made test sample according to SQL Server Compact 3.5 Service Pack 2 Books Online instructions.

I tested with WM 6.5 device and emulator.

I deploy to application folder on WM the following files:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition\v3.5\Devices\System.Data.SqlServerCe.dll
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition\v3.5\Devices\wce500\armv4i\sqlceme35.dll
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition\v3.5\Devices\wce500\armv4i\sqlceqp35.dll
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition\v3.5\Devices\wce500\armv4i\sqlcese35.dll

The code is simple:
using (SqlCeConnection sqlCeConnection = new SqlCeConnection())
{
   button1.Text = sqlCeConnection.ServerVersion;
}

When I run my test on clean WM 6.5(with SSCE 3.1 in ROM), it's ok. Server version is 3.5.8080.0.

When I run my test on WM 6.5 with SSC 3.5 SP1 installed, test fails with the error:
"
The application is trying to load native components of version 5386 that are incompatible with ADO.NET provider of version 8080.
Incompatible versions can lead to application instability and hence loading of SQL Server Compact has been aborted.
Install

I find many discussion threads on this topic, some a lot clearer than others, but I really am trying to avoid having to include either the .NET Framework 2.0 or Visual C++ Runtime 2005 in my ClickOnce deployment of a .NET 4.0 application for which I strongly want to do a private deployment.  I'm deploying to hundreds to thousands of machines outside of the corporate umbrella, and I really want to minimize the number of dependencies outside the application.  My current goal is to keep it to JUST .NET 4.0 (and the windows installer to support that).  However, installs on clean Windows XP SP2 and SP3 machines fail to load the private deployment of SQL CE engine.  It's frustrating that everyone seems to give up and fall back on doing full installs of more prereqs.

Based on reviewing the threads out there, I feel pretty confident that I understand the problem, and I can get it to work by just my .NET 4.0 ClickOnce prereq and then a manual install of the Visual C++ 2005 Runtime redistributable.  Therefore, I am convinced I have everything working other than the VC runtime.  As far as I have read, I am supposed to be able to do a "private assemblies" deployment of the VC runtime as well by including in my copy deployment the Microsoft.VC80.CRT and Microsoft.VC80.MFC that are available under a VS.NET 2005 install.

Background:
Windows Forms application developed with VB 2008 Express.
Using private deployment as described in SQL Server Books Online.
Deploying SQL CE version 3.5.8080.0.
Development system is 32 bit Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 version 6.1.7601.65536.
System installed SQL CE version is 3.5.8080.0.

Observations:
For several months of development there have been no issues with this setup.  A month or so ago I began getting an occasional error message while making updates to the application in the development environment.  The message dialog would come in waves of three several minutes apart and would subside once I rebuilt the project.  The error message is "Unable to load the native components of SQL Server Compact corresponding to the ADO.NET provider version 8080".
The application uses a designer generated DataSet.  While trying to add an additional TableAdapter from the DataSet to the main form the above mentioned error dialog, for which I would click OK, would try to prevent changes from being made.  After several design environment restarts and restoring the impacted form.Designer.vb and .resx files I could finally complete making changes in the form designer.

Issue:
The changes in the designer were not carried over into the

I want to use SQL CE 4 in my WPF application. I've added the contents of SQLCE's Private/ folder to my project and modified the app.config, as described here. The application worked fine with SQL CE 4 before I switched to private deployment.

When I run the application, I get a SqlCeException, the message roughly translates to "The CRT binary in the application/bin folder is not signed and might pose a security risk. Put the original Microsoft CRT binary in the application/bin folder."

I used Windows Explorer to check all dll's in the x86/Microsoft.VC90.CRT and amd64/Microsoft.VC90.CRT folders, they are digitally signed.