Question

The BitConverter class has a field IsLittleEndian which, according to the documentation:

Indicates the byte order (“endianness”) in which data is stored in this computer architecture.

I notice in Reflector that the field is hard-coded to true in the static constructor of BitConverter.

So my question is, do I need to take account of IsLittleEndian when using the BitConverter – in other words, are there any .Net implementations running on big-endian platforms? And if not, what was the purpose of the field in the first place?

Answer 1

The CLI standard does not proscribe any particular Endianness, so if you want your program to be portable, you should not depend on a particular byte order… unless of course in scenarios where a particular byte ordering is required, such as with some data exchange protocols (thanks to user The Moof for pointing this out).

From the CLI Annotated Standard (p.161) — Partition I, section 12.6.3: “Byte Ordering”:

For data types larger than 1 byte, the byte ordering is dependent on the target CPU. Code that depends on byte ordering may not run on all platforms. […]

I suspect that you saw a hard-coded value for IsLittleEndian in Reflector because when you downloaded/installed the .NET Framework on your machine, that particular installation package was targeted at a particular platform (e.g. Intel x86, which is Little Endian).

I could thus imagine that there are other installation packages of the .NET framework that have IsLittleEndian hard-wired to return a different value, depending on the platform that particular installation targets.