Daily Archives: 2008/02/14

marshal_as library in VC2008

The VC++ team added a (simple) marshal_as library in VC2008. But this library only supports simple datatypes like

  • String^ to char* / wchar_t* / BSTR / bstr_t / CComBSTR / std::string / std::wstring / CString<char> / CString<wchar_t>  and vice versa
  • IntPtr to HANDLE  and vice/versa

So, the support only contains “Strings” and “Handle”. But this are the most commonly needed scenarios for marshaling.
The usage of some of the string marshaling is shown here:
http://www.c-plusplus.de/forum/viewtopic-var-p-is-1455833.html#1455833

An overview of the build-in marshaling can be found here: Overview of Marshaling in C++

There is a website (http://www.marshal-as.net/), in which you can look-up additional marshaling implementations like:

Hopefully many, more will follow…
If you have an implementation of some kind of “marshal_as”, just put a comment to Kate Gregory