20. Platform Interoperability and Unsafe Code

C# has great capabilities, but sometimes it still isn’t sufficient and you need to escape out of all the safety it provides and step back into the world of memory addresses and pointers. C# supports this in three ways. The first way is to go through Platform Invoke (P/Invoke) and calls into APIs exposed by unmanaged DLLs. The second is through unsafe code, which enables access to memory pointers and addresses. Frequently, code uses these features in combination. The third way, which is not covered in this text, is through COM interoperability.

This chapter culminates with a small program that determines whether the computer is a virtual computer. The code requires that you do the following: