I'm in the process of rewriting an overengineered and unmaintainable chunk of my company's library code that interfaces between C# and C++. I've started looking into P/Invoke, but it seems like there's not much in the way of accessible help. We're passing a struct that contains various parameters and settings down to unmanaged codes, so we're defining identical structs. We don't need to change any of those parameters on the C++ side, but we do need to access them after the P/Invoked function has returned. My questions are: What is the best way to pass strings? Some are short (device id's which can be set by us), and some are file paths (which may contain Asian characters) Should I pass an IntPtr to the C# struct or should I just let the Marshaller take care of it by putting the struct type in the function signature? Should I be worried about any non-pointer datatypes like bools or enums (in other, related structs)? We have the treat warnings as errors flag set in C++ so we can't use the Microsoft extension for enums to force a datatype. Is P/Invoke actually the way to go? There was some Microsoft documentation about Implicit P/Invoke that said it was more type-safe and performant. For reference, here is one of the pairs of structs I've written so far: C++ /** Struct used for marshalling Scan parameters from managed to unmanaged code. */ struct ScanParameters { LPSTR deviceID; LPSTR spdClock; LPSTR spdStartTrigger; double spinRpm; double startRadius; double endRadius; double trackSpacing; UINT64 numTracks; UINT32 nominalSampleCount; double gainLimit; double sampleRate; double scanHeight; LPWSTR qmoPath; //includes filename LPWSTR qzpPath; //includes filename }; C# /// <summary> /// Struct used for marshalling scan parameters between managed and unmanaged code. /// </summary> [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct ScanParameters { [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPStr)] public string deviceID; [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPStr)] public string spdClock; [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPStr)] public string spdStartTrigger; public Double spinRpm; public Double startRadius; public Double endRadius; public Double trackSpacing; public UInt64 numTracks; public UInt32 nominalSampleCount; public Double gainLimit; public Double sampleRate; public Double scanHeight; [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)] public string qmoPath; [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)] public string qzpPath; }