Question

Microsoft documentation on BinaryReader for ReadUnt32 (for example) states: Reads a 4-byte unsigned integer from the current stream using little-endian encoding. However, is this always correct, even on big-endian systems?

Answer 1

The documentation is certainly a hint that implementors on other platforms should use little-endian encoding, and Mono seems to respect this:

public virtual uint ReadUInt32() {
FillBuffer(4);

return((uint) (m_buffer[0] |
           (m_buffer[1] << 8) |
           (m_buffer[2] << 16) |
           (m_buffer[3] << 24)));
}