What is object marshalling?

Question

I have heard this concept used frequently, but I don\'t have a really good grasp of what it is.

Answer 1

Marshalling is the process of transferring data across application boundaries or between different data formats. Marshalling is very common, for example writing data to disk or to a database is technically marshalling, however the term tends to be used to describe data conversion for "foreign" APIs or for interprocess communication.

For example, in .NET, communicating between managed and unmanaged code (such as accessing certain win32 APIs) will likely require marshalling in order to convert back and forth between managed C# objects and C/C++ style objects (structs, handles, output buffers, etc.) The help for the static Marshal class might be helpful.