Comment by reactordev
6 days ago
The only reason is name mangling. You can disable this or export declspec it and keep the C-like signature. Painstakingly recreate the API in C#, using P/Invoke, and hope for the best. It wasn’t until late 2015 that we got codegen to “automate” this, or roll your own.
My perspective is from a first adopter, not an insider, 24 years ago, so I can’t speak to motive but as a customer, it felt exactly as I described. The documentation around P/Invoke was lax, you were shoved “Managed C++” down your throat by your rep, and any dream of going cross platform died in that meeting room until Miguel De Icaza did something about it.
It certainly is not, it is quite common to use templates directly or indirectly via the C++ standard library, and P/Invoke cannot handle those.
Also during .NET 1.0 days, Microsoft had a Website where you could paste any well known Win32 API or related SDK, and it would spit the annotations.
What was never as good in .NET as it was in VB 6 and still is in Delphi and C++ Builder to this day, was creating and consuming COM, which is kind of annonying given how much Windows team loves it.
At least it isn't as bad as the multiple reboots in C++, which I will keep asserting that from all of those, MFC still has the best tooling to handle COM.