Managed Wrapper Library for Cabinet APIs

This is a managed library that provides the ability to + create and extract cabinet files. It uses cabinet.dll (present on all versions of Windows) + to do the actual compression/decompression. It provides access to nearly all + cabinet capabilities, including spanning of multiple cab files. It even has support for + preserving directory structures and UTF8 paths.

There are two ways to use the library. CabinetInfo + and CabinetFileInfo + (similar to DirectoryInfo and FileInfo respectively) + provide high-level object-oriented methods for doing common file-based cabinet creation and + extraction tasks. On the other hand, the Cabinet + class provides low-level access to all + functionality, and operates completely in terms of .NET Streams. The previous two classes use + the Cabinet class to do all the actual work.

There are also two ways to build the library. + Compiling it normally will produce the fully functional + library in the Microsoft.Cab + namespace, while compiling it with the /D:CABMINIMAL + /D:CABEXTRACTONLY flags will create a compact assembly with only the core extraction + functionality, in the Microsoft.Cab.MiniExtract + namespace.

The cabinet library interops with native cabinet APIs which use the 'cdecl' + calling-convention. When building against .NET Framework versions before 2.0, + this library requires a special post-build step to process the UnmanagedFunctionPointerAttribute. + If you use this code in another assembly, don't forget to run AugmentIL + on it to fix the delegate calling-conventions, otherwise you will encounter a + NullReferenceException when attempting to call the cabinet APIs. When building against + .NET Framework version 2.0 or later, the UnmanagedFunctionPointerAttribute.cs source file + should be omitted.

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