VB.net Wrapper

Pre-compiled Binaries

Information

As C# and VB.net share the .NET framework, it is possible to call the C# wrapper code from VB.net, thus making it possible to access the entire code of CoolProp from VB.net. The overall process is not too painful.

Pre-compiled binaries of the C# wrapper can be downloaded from Csharp. Development binaries coming from the buildbot server can be found at Csharp. Download the platform-independent.7z file and expand it to a folder called platform-independent using 7-zip. Download the special C# shared library for your system architecture to the same location from either Csharp (release) or Csharp (development).

When you are finished, you should have a folder layout something like

main
 |- CoolProp.dll
 |- Example.vb
 |- platform-independent
    |- AbstractState.cs
    |- Configuration.cs
    |- ...

Open Visual Studio 2012 (or any other version of Visual Studio). Even the express version works.

Create a VB console application. Add a project that is a C# Class library to the solution. Add all the platform-independent .cs files to the class library project. Add the Example.vb file to the VB console application project. Add the CoolProp.dll file as an existing file to the VB console project. Right click on the DLL, select the property “Copy to Output Directory” and make sure it is set to “Copy always”. Right click on the console project, “Add Reference…”, expand Solution, then projects. Select the class library project. This will copy the class library dll to the output directory and allow Intellisense to properly parse the C# code.

Caveats

The architecture of the solution/projects should match that of the CoolProp.dll file. So if you are using the 64-bit DLL, make sure the architecture of the console application project is set to x64 rather than Any CPU

User-Compiled Binaries

Common Requirements

Compilation of the C# wrapper for VB.net requires a few common wrapper pre-requisites

Build on 64-bit windows

The build procedure:

# Check out the sources for CoolProp git clone https://github.com/CoolProp/CoolProp –recursive # Move into the folder you just created cd CoolProp # Make a build folder mkdir build && cd build # Build the makefile using CMake cmake .. -DCOOLPROP_CSHARP_MODULE=ON -DCOOLPROP_SWIG_OPTIONS=”-namespace CoolProp” -G “Visual Studio 11 2012 Win64” # Make the C# shared library cmake –build . –config Release