Embedding unmanaged dll into a managed C# dll

Question

I have a managed C# dll that uses an unmanaged C++ dll using DLLImport. All is working great. However, I want to embed that unmanaged DLL inside my managed DLL as explain by Microsoft there:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.interopservices.dllimportattribute.dllimportattribute.aspx

So I added the unmanaged dll file to my managed dll project, set the property to 'Embedded Resource' and modify the DLLImport to something like:

[DllImport("Unmanaged Driver.dll, Wrapper Engine, Version=1.0.0.0,
Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null",
CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Winapi)]

where 'Wrapper Engine' is the assembly name of my managed DLL 'Unmanaged Driver.dll' is the unmanaged DLL

When I run, I get:

Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

I saw from MSDN and from http://blogs.msdn.com/suzcook/ that's supposed to be possible...

Answer 1

You can embed the unmanaged DLL as a resource if you extract it yourself to a temporary directory during initialization, and load it explicitly with LoadLibrary before using P/Invoke. I have used this technique and it works well. You may prefer to just link it to the assembly as a separate file as Michael noted, but having it all in one file has its advantages. Here's the approach I used:

// Get a temporary directory in which we can store the unmanaged DLL, with
// this assembly's version number in the path in order to avoid version
// conflicts in case two applications are running at once with different versions
string dirName = Path.Combine(Path.GetTempPath(), "MyAssembly." +
  Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().Version.ToString());
if (!Directory.Exists(dirName))
  Directory.CreateDirectory(dirName);
string dllPath = Path.Combine(dirName, "MyAssembly.Unmanaged.dll");

// Get the embedded resource stream that holds the Internal DLL in this assembly.
// The name looks funny because it must be the default namespace of this project
// (MyAssembly.) plus the name of the Properties subdirectory where the
// embedded resource resides (Properties.) plus the name of the file.
using (Stream stm = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceStream(
  "MyAssembly.Properties.MyAssembly.Unmanaged.dll"))
{
  // Copy the assembly to the temporary file
  try
  {
    using (Stream outFile = File.Create(dllPath))
    {
      const int sz = 4096;
      byte[] buf = new byte[sz];
      while (true)
      {
        int nRead = stm.Read(buf, 0, sz);
        if (nRead < 1)
          break;
        outFile.Write(buf, 0, nRead);
      }
    }
  }
  catch
  {
    // This may happen if another process has already created and loaded the file.
    // Since the directory includes the version number of this assembly we can
    // assume that it's the same bits, so we just ignore the excecption here and
    // load the DLL.
  }
}

// We must explicitly load the DLL here because the temporary directory 
// is not in the PATH.
// Once it is loaded, the DllImport directives that use the DLL will use
// the one that is already loaded into the process.
IntPtr h = LoadLibrary(dllPath);
Debug.Assert(h != IntPtr.Zero, "Unable to load library " + dllPath);