Serialize in C++ then deserialize in C#?

Question

Is there an easy way to serialize data in c++ (either to xml or binary), and then deserialize the data in C#?

I\'m working with some remote WINNT machines that won\

Answer 1

C++ doesn't have structural introspection (you can't find out the fields of a class at runtime), so there aren't general mechanisms to write a C++ object. You either have to adopt a convention and use code generation, or (more typically) write the serialisation yourself.

There are some libraries for standard formats such as ASN.1, HDF5, and so on which are implementation language neutral. There are proprietary libraries which serve the same purpose (eg protocol buffers).

If you're targeting a particular architecture and compiler, then you can also just dump the C++ object as raw bytes, and create a parser on the C# side.

Quite what is better depends how tightly coupled you want your endpoints to be, and whether the data is mainly numerical (HDF5), tree and sequence structures (ASN.1), or simple plain data objects (directly writing the values in memory)