DllImport vs Declare in VB.NET

Question

I notice in the MSDN documentation that there are multiple ways to declare a reference to a function in an external DLL from within a VB.NET program.

The confusing

Answer 1

If you need to set one of the following options, then use DllImportAttribute attribute, else use Declare. From https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w4byd5y4.aspx

To apply the BestFitMapping, CallingConvention, ExactSpelling, PreserveSig, SetLastError, or ThrowOnUnmappableChar fields to a Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 declaration, you must use the DllImportAttribute attribute instead of the Declare statement.

It is unclear from the above reference only whether this applies to only "Visual Basic 2005" or not, as the above reference is from a .NET 4.5 article. However, I also found this article (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.interopservices.dllimportattribute(v=vs.110).aspx ) which is specific to the DllImportAttribute class in .NET 4.5 :

the Visual Basic compiler emits this attribute when you use the Declare statement. For complex method definitions that include BestFitMapping, CallingConvention, ExactSpelling, PreserveSig, SetLastError, or ThrowOnUnmappableChar fields, you apply this attribute directly to Visual Basic method definitions.

This tells you that the Declare option is VB.net syntactical sugar which is converted to DllImportAttribute at compile time, and outlines the exact scenarios when using DllImportAttribute directly is recommended.