Question

This is my first time using C#, so I’m very much out of my element. But I have faith that the wonderful people here at Stack Overflow can help me out! I’ve come up with the following code (below) based on some other pieces of code I found floating around on the internet. What I am trying to do is to look up all the “text” DNS records (TXT) of a given domain. I’ve started out simple, with a Console Application in Visual C# 2008 Express looking up the records for google.com. I’ll worry about customizing the domain based on command line parameters later; for now I’d just like to get this working. Any DNS lookup tools can tell you that google.com has this DNS text record in their DNS:
v=spf1 include:_netblocks.google.com ip4:216.73.93.70/31 ip4:216.73.93.72/31 ~all
But unfortunately that’s not what I’m getting. Here’s my code:

namespace DnsUtils
{
    using System;
    using System.Collections;
    using System.ComponentModel;
    using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
    using System.Text;

    public class DnsTxt
    {
        [DllImport("dnsapi", EntryPoint = "DnsQuery_W", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, SetLastError = true, ExactSpelling = true)]
        private static extern int DnsQuery([MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.VBByRefStr)]ref string pszName, QueryTypes wType, QueryOptions options, int aipServers, ref IntPtr ppQueryResults, int pReserved);

        [DllImport("dnsapi", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)]
        private static extern void DnsRecordListFree(IntPtr pRecordList, int FreeType);

        public static string[] GetTXTRecords(string domain)
        {
            IntPtr ptr1 = IntPtr.Zero;
            IntPtr ptr2 = IntPtr.Zero;
            TXTRecord recTxt;

            if (Environment.OSVersion.Platform != PlatformID.Win32NT)
            {
                throw new NotSupportedException();
            }

            ArrayList list1 = new ArrayList();
            UnicodeEncoding encoding = new UnicodeEncoding();

            int num1 = DnsTxt.DnsQuery(ref domain, QueryTypes.DNS_TYPE_TEXT, QueryOptions.DNS_QUERY_BYPASS_CACHE, 0, ref ptr1, 0);
            if (num1 != 0)
            {
                throw new Win32Exception(num1);
            }

            for (ptr2 = ptr1; !ptr2.Equals(IntPtr.Zero); ptr2 = recTxt.pNext)
            {
                recTxt = (TXTRecord)Marshal.PtrToStructure(ptr2, typeof(TXTRecord));
                if (recTxt.wType == 16)
                {
                    IntPtr pointerToAddressStringArray = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(IntPtr.Size);
                    IntPtr addressStringArray = Marshal.ReadIntPtr(pointerToAddressStringArray);

                    for (int i = 0; i < recTxt.dwStringCount; i++)
                    {
                        IntPtr addressCharArray = Marshal.ReadIntPtr(recTxt.pStringArray, i * 4);
                        int offset = 0;

                        ArrayList bytesList = new ArrayList();
                        byte newByte = Marshal.ReadByte(addressCharArray, offset++);
                        while (newByte != 0)
                        {
                            bytesList.Add(newByte);
                            newByte = Marshal.ReadByte(addressCharArray, offset++);
                        }
                        byte[] bytesArray = new byte[offset];
                        bytesList.CopyTo(bytesArray);
                        string textValue = encoding.GetString(bytesArray);

                        list1.Add(textValue);
                    }

                    Marshal.FreeHGlobal(pointerToAddressStringArray);
                }
            }

            DnsTxt.DnsRecordListFree(ptr2, 0);
            return (string[])list1.ToArray(typeof(string));
        }

        private enum QueryOptions
        {
            DNS_QUERY_ACCEPT_TRUNCATED_RESPONSE = 1,
            DNS_QUERY_BYPASS_CACHE = 8,
            DNS_QUERY_DONT_RESET_TTL_VALUES = 0x100000,
            DNS_QUERY_NO_HOSTS_FILE = 0x40,
            DNS_QUERY_NO_LOCAL_NAME = 0x20,
            DNS_QUERY_NO_NETBT = 0x80,
            DNS_QUERY_NO_RECURSION = 4,
            DNS_QUERY_NO_WIRE_QUERY = 0x10,
            DNS_QUERY_RESERVED = -16777216,
            DNS_QUERY_RETURN_MESSAGE = 0x200,
            DNS_QUERY_STANDARD = 0,
            DNS_QUERY_TREAT_AS_FQDN = 0x1000,
            DNS_QUERY_USE_TCP_ONLY = 2,
            DNS_QUERY_WIRE_ONLY = 0x100
        }

        private enum QueryTypes
        {
            DNS_TYPE_TEXT = 16
        }

        [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
        private struct TXTRecord
        {
            public IntPtr pNext;
            public string pName;
            public short wType;
            public short wDataLength;
            public int flags;
            public int dwTtl;
            public int dwReserved;
            public int dwStringCount;
            public IntPtr pStringArray;
        }

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                string[] s = DnsUtils.DnsTxt.GetTXTRecords("google.com");
                foreach (string st in s)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Value: {0}", st);
                }
            }
            catch (Win32Exception e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
            }
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

When I run this code, it prints Value: ?. Now I’m hoping that this means it actually did the DNS query and got the results as expected, but I just screwed something up in the part where it tries to convert an IntPtr to an array of strings (because I’m guessing it’s harder to debug the former). Anyways, have any suggestions? Can anyone see where I went awry? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This line looks a bit off to me:

IntPtr addressCharArray = Marshal.ReadIntPtr(recTxt.pStringArray, i * 4);

It looks like you’d be reading the first 4 bytes of the first string entry of the TXT record as an IntPtr. I think something like:

string s = Marshal.PtrToStringAuto(recTxt.pStringArray);

would get you the first entry. After that, I think something like:

IntPtr p = new IntPtr(recTxt.pStringArray.ToInt32() + sizeof(uint) * i);
string s = Marshal.PtrToStringAuto(p);

would get the remainders.