Packet.dll was created to provide a layer to access the low level functionalities of Npcap in a system-independent way. This library handles all the system-dependent details (like managing the devices, interacting with the OS to manage the adapters, looking for the information in the registry and so on), and exports an API that is uniform across all Windows OSes. In this way, applications or libraries based on it can run without being recompiled under any Windows operating system.
The other important feature of this library is its ability to handle NPF driver. Packet.dll transparently installs and starts the driver when an application attempts to access an adapter. This avoids the manual installation of the driver through the control panel.
The source code of Packet.dll is freely available and completely documented. However, packet.dll should be considered an internal API, because its purpose inside Npcap is to be a building block for the real public API: wpcap.dll.
As a consequence, since the normal and suggested way for an application to use Npcap is through wpcap.dll, we don't guarantee that the packet.dll API will not be changed in future releases of Npcap, and we don't provide support for this API. For the same reason, this manual doesn't contain any more the Doxygen-generated documentation of Packet.dll: the user will have to run Doxygen on his own to create it, or read the comments in the source code.