Tackling the PathTooLongException

I received a System.IO.PathTooLongException the other day while deleting some files using System.IO.File.Delete. It seems that .net cannot handle long file names and I had to revert to plain old win32 api to do the job using the following declaration:

	using System;
	using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
	[DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
	[return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)]
	internal static extern bool DeleteFile(string lpFileName);
	// This code snippet is provided under the Microsoft Permissive License.
	public static void Delete(string fileName) {
	// call it with a file name prefixed by \\?\:
	string formattedName = @"\\?\" + fileName;
	DeleteFile(formattedName);
	}

view raw deleting with win32 api hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I have also spotted Delimon.Win32.I​O Library (V4.0) which I would have used if it was available as a Nuget package. This lib provides a lot of System.IO classes using the win32 api instead, handy if you are dealing with long filenames.