What are the best practices when using SWIG with C#?

Question

Has anybody out there used the SWIG library with C#? If you have, what pitfalls did you find and what is the best way to use the library? I am thinking about using it as a

Answer 1

I think the mistake the earlier posters did was read the docs and not look at the examples.

A few hours ago I needed to interface some C++ classes to C#. I looked in my Swig dir (I already had it for other work), found the directory Examples/csharp/class, browsed the code, loaded the solution, grokked it, copied it, put in my code, it worked, my job was done.

With that said, generated P/Invoke code isn't a solution for all needs. Depending on your project, it may be just as simple to write some simple API wrappers yourself or write managed C++ (Look up SlimDX for a superb example of this).

For my needs, it was simple and easy - I had mystuff.dll, and now in addition I can ship mystuffnet.dll. I'll agree that the doc is difficult to get into.

Edit: I noticed the OP only mentioned C. For that, you don't really need Swig, just use the usual C#/C DLLImport interop syntax. Swig becomes useful when you want to let C++ classes be invoked from C#.