Question

I need one of my C# .NET applications to act as a bootp server. The protocol is pretty simple but I dont know an easy way to build/parse the binary data.

Any ideas:

_{(source: tcpipguide.com)}

Answer 1

There’s a couple ways to do this. You might be able to play around with the marshaling attributes such as StructLayout to pack a structure into a byte array but this is probably tricky and not worth the effort.

You could use a specialized framework such as Protobuf to attribute a class in such a way that it will be serialized to match the structure you need.

But in my experience, the easiest, fastest, and most flexible method of creating a binary structure like this is to use a MemoryStream class to hold a buffer of byes, then use a BinaryWriter around it to actually write the binary data into the stream.

In any case, it helps to have a working server to reference. Use a tool like Wireshark or Microsoft Network Monitor to capture the wire traffic so you can compare your wire format to an example that is known to work.