Any idea what can cause “vshost32.exe has stopped working” in Visual Studio 2013?

Question

A C# WPF application I am working on contains many calls to an unmanaged external DLL. All calls to the DLL work as expected when running the application normally (i.e. outs

Answer 1

The vshost32.exe error is caused by an incorrect DllImport statement - the return type of the external DLL cannot be string, it must be IntPtr.

Here is the corrected code:

[DllImport("Client.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
private static extern IntPtr ClientGetVersion();

...and this is the revised call to the DLL method:

string version;

try
{
  version = Marshal.PtrToStringAnsi(ClientGetVersion());

}
catch (Exception ex)
{
  // Error handling omitted for clarity...
}

Thanks to @HansPassant for the answer.