Question

Recently I discovered C#’s P/Invoke. And I want to know which DLL are commonly used and what they are capable of.

I’ve found this list http://www.win7dll.info/ but it’s too big, and doesn’t provide any useful description.

What I’m hoping for – is “you can use libxxx.dll for drawing on desktop, and libyyy.dll will allow you to play sound, libzzz.dll gives access to taskbar’s preview window” etc…

Thanks for the pointers.

Answer 1

This is really going about the problem the wrong way around. You don’t P/Invoke entire DLLs, you P/Invoke specific functions that are exported from particular DLLs. And therefore you don’t care about which DLLs exist and what they do, you only care about specific functions that enable you to do specific things. You need to figure out what you want to accomplish, and then figure out how to do it. Lots of things are already wrapped by the .NET Framework so none of your own P/Invoke code is required. If P/Invoke is required, then you’ll write that code after you know what you want to do and which function you want to call. The questions you should be asking on Stack Overflow are “how do I do x?” We’ll tell you which functions you need, and from that you’ll know which DLLs you need.

Anyway, it’s quite hard to provide any better description than the list does. user32.dll literally provides user interface components. This includes a vast array of things, from windows to message boxes to displaying text, to processing window messages, to displaying the desktop, and more.

There is a Wikipedia article on the most common Windows DLLs. But the information they give is mostly just for curiosity’s sake.