dahall/Vanara

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2092 stars · 225 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Vanara is a set of .NET libraries providing P/Invoke declarations, interfaces, enums, and structures for many native Windows APIs, along with helpful wrappers. It is distributed as modular NuGet assemblies targeting .NET Framework, .NET Core, and .NET Standard, with extensions for WinForms, WPF, and UWP.

Use cases

• call native Windows APIs from C# without writing P/Invoke signatures
• access Windows Shell features like taskbar, shell items, and dialogs from .NET
• interoperate with kernel32, user32, gdi32, and other Win32 libraries
• wrap native handles and COM interfaces in safe .NET classes
• build Windows desktop apps that need OS-level functionality

When to choose

• you need to call Win32 or COM APIs from .NET and want maintained, tested signatures
• you want modular NuGet packages covering specific Windows libraries
• you need wrappers that make raw native APIs safer and more idiomatic in C#

When to avoid

• you are targeting non-Windows platforms exclusively
• you only need a handful of simple P/Invoke calls and prefer hand-written declarations
• you need a higher-level abstraction rather than near-raw API access

Facets

library · maturity active

sdk developer-tools developer-tools windows apis windows dotnet cross-platform pinvoke windows-api interop winapi shell nuget csharp

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