Is it Possible to call a C# library (dll) from a non managed languagesuch as Perl?

[SteveM]

I suspect that this is either not possible or really really tricky,
but need to ask. We have a great deal of work done in perl in our
environment, and we are currently starting to do more work with .Net
and C#. A marriage of the two would be nice. I believe its fairly
straight forward to call unmanaged code from within a C# application,
but calling a created (and managed) C# dll from within a non managed
language (in our case Perl) is a bit more though provoking. So you net
guru's is it possible and if so any good links on how to do it? I read
somewhere that you could use COM, to make the managed library
available but am unsure the steps involved. If that works I believe
Perl can access COM, so that might be a possiblility.
Thanks for any suggestions or help
-SteveM

 

[Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]]

Steve,

The only option is COM interop, where you would access a .NET component
through COM. You might want to check out this section of the MSDN
documentation titled "Exposing .NET Framework Components to COM":

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zsfww439.aspx

 

[carnold]

I suspect that this is either not possible or really really tricky,
but need to ask. We have a great deal of work done in perl in our
environment, and we are currently starting to do more work with .Net
and C#. A marriage of the two would be nice. I believe its fairly
straight forward to call unmanaged code from within a C# application,
but calling a created (and managed) C# dll from within a non managed
language (in our case Perl) is a bit more though provoking. So you net
guru's is it possible and if so any good links on how to do it? I read
somewhere that you could use COM, to make the managed library
available but am unsure the steps involved. If that works I believe
Perl can access COM, so that might be a possiblility.
Thanks for any suggestions or help
-SteveM

SWIG enables you to do this by defining a class with virtual methods
in C++ and then implementing/overriding those methods in C#. That'll
get you C++ to C#; Perl into C++ shouldn't be too hard ... but it is a
lot of hoops to jump thru (tho still possibly easier than COM).