Question

How to use a php extension like mcrypt? My first thought was to find mcrypt.php and simply include it (context.Include(“mcrypt.php”, false);), but of course that doesn’t exist since it is written in C.
I was reading over Writing compiled PHP extensions in PHP post from the blog but that seems to be about creating your own extension for use in .net. But maybe Im wrong considering this statement: “Implement Phalanger extension in PHP langage. When you take your PHP library and compile it using Phalanger, the result is DLL working as any other extension”
But even still phpc (phalanger php compiler) is not going to compile c code as far as I know though I haven’t tried.

these are the calls my php class is trying to make:
mcrypt_module_open
mcrypt_enc_get_key_size
mcrypt_enc_get_block_size

Answer 1

Jakub Míšek’s answer is definitely right and if this post helps you please vote him up as well. However I wanted to simplify what he said as his advice still took me some time to understand what he was saying. Also please Jakub if you get a chance to read this correct me if Im wrong about anything.

First thing that got me about his answer was this file

php_mcrypt.mng

mng what is that????
But after digging through their [Phalanger] svn and the files located in

C:\Program Files\Phalanger 3.0\Wrappers

I found the mcrypt file. Also with some help from the php chat room I got a clue as to what the mng was, Managed Code.

So after adding the file as a reference as well as editing the web.config file to include it (as Jakub shows)

  <phpNet>
    <classLibrary>
      <add assembly="php_mcrypt.mng, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=4ef6ed87c53048a3" section="mcrypt" />
    </classLibrary>
    <scriptLibrary/>
  </phpNet>

These lines must be feeding into Phalanger to load this extension when compiling (I think/know).

After that everything seems to compile and run fine! Thanks Jakub