A call to PInvoke function '[…]' has unbalanced the stack

Question

I\'m getting this weird error on some stuff I\'ve been using for quite a while. It may be a new thing in Visual Studio 2010 but I\'m not sure.
I\'m trying to call a unam

Answer 1

In my case (VB 2010 and DLL compiled with Intel Fortran 2011 XE) the problem exists when my application targets .NET Framework 4. If I change targeted framework to version 3.5, then everything works fine as expected. So, I would guess the reason is something introduced in .Net Framework 4 but I have no idea at the moment which one

Update: The problem was solved by recompiling Fortran DLL and explicitly specifying STDCALL as calling convention for export names in the DLL.

Answer 2

Use the following code, if say your DLL has the name MyDLL.dll and you want to use the function MyFunction within the Dll

[DllImport("MyDLL.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
public static extern void MyFunction();

this worked for me.

Answer 3

It could also be that in the .NET Framework version 3.5, the pInvokeStackImbalance MDA is disabled by default. Under 4.0 (or maybe VS2010) it is enabled by default.

Yes. Technically, the code was always wrong, and previous versions of the framework silently corrected it.

To quote the .NET Framework 4 Migration Issues document: "To improve performance in interoperability with unmanaged code, incorrect calling conventions in a platform invoke now cause the application to fail. In previous versions, the marshaling layer resolved these errors up the stack... If you have binaries that cannot be updated, you can include the <NetFx40_PInvokeStackResilience> element in your application's configuration file to enable calling errors to be resolved up the stack as in earlier versions. However, this may affect the performance of your application."

An easy way to fix this is to specify the calling convention and make sure it is the same as in the DLL. A __declspec(dllexport) should yield a cdecl format.

[DllImport("foo.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]

Answer 4

I had a _cdecl c++ dll that I called without any trouble from Visual Studio 2008, and then the identical code in Visual Studio 2010 would not work. I got the same PInvoke ... has unbalanced the stack error as well.

The solution for me was to specify the calling convention in the DllImport(...) attribute: From:

[DllImport(CudaLibDir)] 

To:

[DllImport(CudaLibDir, CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]

I guess they changed the default calling convention for DLLImport between .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0?

Answer 5

Maybe the problem lies in the calling convention. Are you sure the unmanaged function was compiled as stdcall and not something else ( i would guess fastcall ) ?