MSDN Magazine - January 2009 - (Page 17)

write the bulk of your application. It is certainly possible to do so, but you’ll find that developer productivity is much lower than in a pure C++ or pure C#/Visual Basic environment and that your application runs much slower to boot. So when you use C++/CLI, compile only the files you need with the /clr switch, and use a combination of pure managed or pure native assemblies to build the core functionality of your application. Considerations for Your Interop Architecture Once you have decided to use interop in your application and decided which technology to use, there are a few high-level considerations when architecting your solution, including your API design and the developer experience for those coding against the interop boundary. Also take into account where you place your native managed transitions and the performance impact this can have on your application. And finally, you need to consider lifetime management and whether you need to do anything to bridge the gap between the garbage-collected world of the managed environment and the manual/deterministic lifetime management of the native world. rience or for minimizing the cost of building the boundary? Are the developers coding against this boundary the same ones writing the native code? Are they other developers in your company? Are they third-party developers extending your application or using it as a service? What is their sophistication level? Are they comfortable with native paradigms or are they only happy when writing managed code? Your answers to these questions will help determine where you end up on the continuum between a very thin wrapper over the native code and a rich managed object model that uses native code under the covers. With a thin wrapper, all the native paradigms will bleed through, and developers will be very aware of the boundary and the fact that they are coding against a native API. With a thicker wrapper you can almost completely hide the fact that native code is in the picture—the file system APIs in the BCL are an excellent example of a very thick interop layer that provides a firstclass managed-object model. Performance and the Location of Your Interop Boundary Before you spend too much time optimizing your application, it’s important that you determine whether or not you have an interop performance problem. Many applications use interop in performance-critical sections and need to pay close attention here. But many others are going to be using interop in response to user API Design and Developer Experience When thinking about your API design, there are several questions you need to ask yourself: Who is going to be coding against my interop layer, and should I optimize for improving his expe- msdnmagazine.com January 2009 17 http://datadynamics.com http://datadynamics.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - January 2009

Toolbox CLR Inside Out Basic Instincts Cutting Edge Test Run First Look� Geneva Framework Silverlight Windows Mobile Service Station Security Briefs Extreme ASP.NET Foundations .NET Matters { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - January 2009

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