Tomer Gabel's annoying spot on the 'net RSS 2.0
# Saturday, 17 February 2007

By far one of the most annoying aspects of the .NET Compact Framework is how heavily it relies on P/Invoke to fill in the gaps. The framework itself is missing huge pieces of functionality, and with the lack of C++/CLI for the Compact Framework a developer is often time left with no choice but to hack around the missing functionality with P/Invoke (or COM interop, if you have the patience to muck about with ATL).

The problem is that, on occasion, a P/Invoke call would result in a MissingMethodException (in fact, if you're really unlucky, the type loader will throw the same exception on loading the method actually making the P/Invoke call). Although a lot of the scenarios have been thoroughly ironed out by now and can be resolved through a Google search or some hacking on the developer's part, there is one scario that is esoteric enough that I couldn't find any references to it on the internet: you can get a MissingMethodException when you are out of memory.

We're working on an extremely large (in mobile proportions) and complex project, involving massive amounts of .NET logic combined with a very large, performance-concious and memory-hungry native codebase. We've had to hack around a lot of missing capabilities in the .NET Compact Framework (as well as some bugs and/or shortcomings in other parts of the OS), and one of our native calls would inconsistently throw a MisingMethodException; having reearched the problem for a day or two I was convinced that the problem was an incorrect function prototype for the exported function and added explicit calling convention declarations. This seemed to have resolved and I was content for a couple of days, until the problem resurfaced.

The exception content itself is next-to-useless, and since the same P/Invoke call would work intermittently I was hoping that enabling the loader log might supply some further information. Alas, all the log would provide was the following line:

Failed to find/load [SomeDll.dll] (even in [\Program Files\Somewhere\])

Not good. I then dug up another article on the subject and proceeded to enable the interop log, which provided some additional information:

JIT ERROR FOR PINVOKE METHOD (Managed -> Native):
[pinvokeimpl][preservesig]
int Workarounds::GetSinkWrapper(out IImageSink , IImageEncoder );
int (I4_VAL) GetSinkWrapper(IImageSink& ** (INTF_REF) , IImageEncoder *(INTF_VAL) );

I was originally interested in the bizarre native signature generation (specifically the IImageSink& ** parameter - where'd the reference come from?), but upon reading some valid log files for working methods I was convinced that it's a dead duck. I then set my attention to the JIT message: what has the JIT to do with a native function? I theorized that the JIT is responsible for the native signature generation for native functions and kept working under that assumption. That narrowed the question down to, "what went wrong with the JIT compiler?"

Eventually it occured to me that this might be yet another manifestation of the memory limitation issue (processes under Windows CE 5.0 are limited to a 32MB address space). The P/Invoke call is made fairly late into the application; I added a dummy function to the library which I called on application initialization. This forced the JIT to take care of the native library before anything was sucking up memory, and the issue was resolved.

The moral of the story? If you get MissingMethodExceptions on your P/Invoke calls, fisrt make sure your DLL is actually deployed; then check the DllImport signature (you can find a lot of useful resources on this FAQ). Finally, make sure you're not out of memory.

Saturday, 17 February 2007 16:26:26 (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    -
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