Question

I’ve been trying to do this for a long time, and that is to get the zlib library to work with my program. I’m using Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition with a CLR Windows Forms Application. The thing is I’m worried that zlib is to old to work with what I’m using. All the examples (the very few examples) of zlib I find are with a Win32 application.

And that’s the other thing; I can’t find any zlib examples that aren’t outdated. And I do understand that zlib is old, but I can’t find any alternatives 🙁

So if anyone could first of all tell me if its possible to use zlib with my application, and how, thanks a bunch. If someone wants to take it a step further and maybe recommend a better zlib-like program that I can use, thanks even more.

(And by the way, I’m creating an application to read the level data of the game Minecraft. A little can be found on that here.)

Answer 1

It is not a problem, C++/CLI was made to handle tasks like this. You have to tell the compiler that the zlib header isn’t managed code with #pragma managed and tell the linker to link the import library. Like this, in a sample console mode app:

#include "stdafx.h"
#pragma managed(push, off)
#include "c:/temp/deleteme/include/zlib.h"
#pragma managed(pop)
#pragma comment(lib, "c:/temp/deleteme/lib/zdll.lib")


using namespace System;

int main(array<System::String ^> ^args)
{
    const char* vers = zlibVersion();
    String^ mvers = System::Runtime::InteropServices::Marshal::PtrToStringAnsi((IntPtr)(void*)vers);
    Console::WriteLine(mvers);
    Console::ReadKey();
    return 0;
}

Only other thing you have to do is to get the DLL copied into the build directory so you can debug the code. Project + Properties, Build Events, Post-Build Event, Command line:

 xcopy /d "c:\temp\deleteme\zlib1.dll" "$(TargetDir)"

Maybe you want to pick a different install directory 🙂