Question

I am writing a program to interact with the management interface for a piece of equipment over TCP. The problem is, the documentation for the equipment is written in C, while the program I am writing is in C#. My problem is, the documentation specifies

The communication is based upon the C structure-based API buffer

No amount of Googling can seem to point me to this API or how I send a raw structure across TCP. The documentation seems to imply that I should use memcpy to copy the struct to the TCP buffer, but C# doesn’t directly support memcpy. Is there an equivelant method in C# or a different way to accomplish this

Answer 1

You could build a .Net version of your C struct, then use marshalling to send a byte array through the network. Here’s an example with the MLocation C struct.

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, Pack = 8)]
public struct MLocation
{
    public int x;
    public int y;
};

public static void Main()
{
    MLocation test = new MLocation();

    // Gets size of struct in bytes
    int structureSize = Marshal.SizeOf(test);

    // Builds byte array
    byte[] byteArray = new byte[structureSize];

    IntPtr memPtr = IntPtr.Zero;

    try
    {
        // Allocate some unmanaged memory
        memPtr = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(structureSize);

        // Copy struct to unmanaged memory
        Marshal.StructureToPtr(test, memPtr, true);

        // Copies to byte array
        Marshal.Copy(memPtr, byteArray, 0, structureSize);
    }
    finally
    {
        if (memPtr != IntPtr.Zero)
        {
            Marshal.FreeHGlobal(memPtr);
        }
    }

    // Now you can send your byte array through TCP
    using (TcpClient client = new TcpClient("host", 8080))
    {
        using (NetworkStream stream = client.GetStream())
        {
            stream.Write(byteArray, 0, byteArray.Length);
        }
    }

    Console.ReadLine();
}