WinRTCoreWindow

Hosting a raw CoreWindow on hWnd from C# or C++.

Projects

WinRTCoreWindow.vcxproj

This is the project containing the C++ version of the code.

CoreWindowSharp.csproj

This is the project containing the C# version of the code.

Note

There are minor differences between the two to conform to each languages' standards, but they both achieve the same end result.

How does it work?

C++:

1. Load Windows.UI.dll and extract a function pointer out of it pointing to a private function (CreateCoreWindow).
2. Cast that into the PrivateCreateCoreWindow delegate
3. Init winrt (winrt::init_apartment())
4. Create a standard hWnd window (CreateWindowEx and WNDCLASS)
5. Create a GUID referring to CoreWindow.
6. Call the func pointer delegate, passing in the handle of that hWnd window and the GUID.
7. Initialize the XamlPresenter (found in the internal version of Windows.UI.Xaml.Hosting)
8. Init winrt components and set the content of the XamlPresenter.
9. Init ICoreDispatcher with ptr to CoreWindow dispatcher
10. Process dispatcher messages.

C#:

1. DllImport the Windows.UI.dll library at ordinal 1500.
2. Create a standard hWnd window (CreateWindowEx and WNDCLASSEX)
3. Call CreateCoreWindow on the main thread and discard its output. (It's still initialized on the thread, so we don't need the output directly.)
4. Set the ICoreWindow instance to CoreWindow.GetForCurrentThread().
5. Initialize the XamlPresenter (found in the internal version of Windows.UI.Xaml.Hosting).
6. Init winrt components and set the content of the XamlPresenter.
7. Extract the ICoreDispatcher as a Windows.UI.Core.CoreDispatcher.
8. Command CoreDispatcher to start processing dispatcher messages.

Demo