Hey,

I have always wanted to know what is really behind .dll files, .dll's that do things such as, for example burn files to a disk, you have all these SDK's with .dll files in it that do it for you really but what if you didn't have the .dll files and you had to make your own, how would you go about programming a .dll file that for example burns a file to a disk?

I know about compiling them and things like that but i mean with the code side of things, say you have a .dll that burns a file to the disk ready made, you may have code (VB this is kind of like):
That maybe the most basic but that's often how easy SDK's make things, but the code behind that is more complex than you could ever know lol (that's from what little i know about the code behind.)

Can anyone explain anything about the code behind them, maybe some examples, links to resources, tutorials and other useful things?

Hope i have not made my post confusing.
Thanks,
Lee.

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Well... dll's have changed - for .NET a .dll is called an Assembly File. The dll's that get generated essentially just talk to the windows API. Then the api talks to the Runtimes (in a VB or VS world) and the Runtime files communicate to the Machine-Code which talks to the hardware.

When not in the .NET world programmers used to run into "dll hell" which was truly hell - because many different versions of dll's would exist on a box and be registered and not know which one to communicate to. DLL files are dynamic link libraries - which are generally shortcuts to windows api. When you publish, release or Debug in .NET you will see an exe gets created along with a bunch of dll's (assemblies). These dll's can be thrown into a .NET website, WEbService, App, Mobile app, etc... they are all the same and expose the hooks to call their methods, construct their objects, etc...

Dim Burner as new GSWburner.burner
Burner.burn("C:\test.avi")

This constructs GSW.Burner object and calls its method to burn hope this helps... and we can explain further if you like...

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Its given me more of an insight to .dll files but what i was actually wondering is maybe an example piece of code if you have any or if you know of a website with one? The code i gave was just an example of how easy things are made, without the things like that are code would be much bigger and more to it.

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Have you got any links to good examples and tutorials?

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Well.. what exactly are you trying to do? Are you trying to make a Com Obect so you can execute windows process/api via Classic ASP?

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I want to learn how to make .dll files and use them in my program, i know they are sometimes used for common operation i think, like photoshop might have one to handle plugins, i am making 1 application at the moment for invoices and things like that but then i will have a near duplicate program that does similar things but for another reason, so instead of recopying and then loosing track of it all i thought if i had the .dll it would then help me make my code much better as i could use it in one application and then another?

I am only looking for information and good tutorials about them as it seems they are hard to come by in this area, at the moment i am not concerned about making it C++ compatible or anything, i just want it for vb.net.

Hope that's clearer.
Thanks.

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