Question

I’m making a library which will perform operations to read a processes memory, and get information from said process.

The problem I have is that to call the functions, I have to pass a lot of the variables every time, even if their values haven’t changed.

For instance, ReadProcessMemory requires me to pass:

• Process Handle
• Memory Address
• Main Module Base Address
• Amount of bytes to read

The only thing that will be changing for each read is the Memory Address, so I don’t really need to pass the rest of the variables every time I call the function (I actually have 3 functions which can be reduced in this way, and may have more shortly).

Could anyone give me a brief explanation as to how I should go about this? Will the variables exist at runtime so I can just call the function and use them directly from the DLL file?

Answer 1

You can use named parameters when calling methods with optional parameters.

public void MyMethod(string s = null, int i = 0, MyType t = null)
{ 
    /* body */ 
}

Call it like so:

MyMethod(i: 10, t: new MyType());
MyMethod("abc");
MyMethod("abc", t: new MyType());

Alternatively you could use overloads:

public void MyMethod(string s)
{
    MyMethod(s, 0, null);
}
public void MyMethod(int i)
{
    MyMethod(null, i, null);
}
public void MyMethod(MyType t)
{
    MyMethod(null, 0, t);
}
public void MyMethod(string s = null, int i = 0, MyType t = null)
{ 
    /* body */ 
}

Yet another option is to use a parameters class like so:

public class MyParametersClass
{
    public string s { get; set; }
    public int i { get; set; }
    public MyType t { get;set; }

    public MyParametersClass()
    {
        // set defaults
        s = null;
        i = 0;
        MyType = null;
    }
}

public void MyMethod(MyParametersClass c)
{ 
    /* body */ 
}

Calling like so:

MyMethod(new MyParametersClass 
{
    i = 25,
    t = new MyType()
});

Using the parameters class is likely your preferred approach. The parameters class can be carried around as you process whatever you’re processing. 🙂 Any changes made to it will not be lost…

var parameters = new MyParametersClass();
MyMethod(parameters);
parameters.i = 26;
MyMethod(parameters);