[RESOLVED] Serializing to Byte array

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'm trying to take a structure, and turn it into an array of Bytes so that I can send it via UDP. It seems like this should be a case of using a BinaryFormatter to serialize the structure, but I can't see any good way of turning this into an array of Bytes. Any suggestions?

[Atheist]

This is just a wild guess, havent even tested it properly.

Dim c As New Class1
        Dim formatter As Runtime.Serialization.IFormatter = New Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter
        Dim memStream As New IO.MemoryStream
        formatter.Serialize(memStream, c)
        Using b As New IO.BinaryReader(memStream)
            Dim bte(b.BaseStream.Length) As Byte
            b.Read(bte, 0, b.BaseStream.Length)
        End Using
        memStream.Close()

[Shaggy Hiker]

Thanks, it looks quite plausible, I'll look it up. The MemoryStream was the step I was missing. I got thinking about it as I was driving around today, and realized I should pursue something close to that (a filestream), but I had forgotten the MemoryStream (that's ironic), which seems more likely.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Finally got to test this, and it worked well. Oddly, BaseStream.Length returns a Long (ok, I guess that's not really all that odd, but it IS a huge number), so it had to be cast to an integer (it will never be that big in this app).