Casting a byte array to a managed structure

Question

Update: Answers to this question helped me code the open sourced project AlicanC\'s Modern Warfare 2 Tool on GitHub. You can see how I am reading these packets in MW

Answer 1

For those who have access to C# 7.3 features, I use this piece of unsafe code to "serialize" to bytes:

public static class Serializer
{
    public static unsafe byte[] Serialize<T>(T value) where T : unmanaged
    {
        byte[] buffer = new byte[sizeof(T)];

        fixed (byte* bufferPtr = buffer)
        {
            Buffer.MemoryCopy(&value, bufferPtr, sizeof(T), sizeof(T));
        }

        return buffer;
    }

    public static unsafe T Deserialize<T>(byte[] buffer) where T : unmanaged
    {
        T result = new T();

        fixed (byte* bufferPtr = buffer)
        {
            Buffer.MemoryCopy(bufferPtr, &result, sizeof(T), sizeof(T));
        }

        return result;
    }
}

A unmanaged type can be a struct (simple struct without reference types, those a considered managed structs) or a native type such as int, short, etc.