Run my third-party DLL file with PowerShell

Question

I am not sure if this is possible or not with PowerShell.

But basically I have a Windows Forms program that configures a program called EO Server. The EO Server has an API, and I make a reference to EOServerAPI.dll to make the following code run.

using EOserverAPI;
...
private void myButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    String MDSConnString="Data Source=MSI;Initial Catalog=EOMDS;Integrated Security=True;";

    //Create the connection
    IEOMDSAPI myEOMDSAPI = EOMDSAPI.Create(MDSConnString);

    //Get JobID
    Guid myMasterJobID = myEOMDSAPI.GetJobID("myJobRocks");
}

Is it possible to interact with an API DLL file and make the same types of calls as you would in a Windows Forms application?

Answer 1

Yes, you can:

Add-Type -Path $customDll
$a = new-object custom.type

You call a static method like so:

[custom.type]::method()

Instead of Add-Type, you can also use reflection:

[Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile($customDll)

(Note that even the above is calling the Reflection library and the LoadFile static method.)

Answer 2

Take a look at the blog post Load a Custom DLL from PowerShell. If you can interact with an object in .NET, you can probably do it in PowerShell too.

Answer 3

Actually the other offered solutions don't work for me, here it's an alternative that works perfectly for me:

$AssemblyPath = "C:\SomePath\SomeLIB.dll"
$bytes = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes($AssemblyPath)
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load($bytes)