Using BinaryWriter on an Object

Question

My application is a small C# database, and I\'m using BinaryWriter to save the database to a file which is working fine with the basic types such as bool, uint3

Answer 1

You can use serialization for that, especially the BinaryFormatter to get a byte[].
Note: The types you are serializing must be marked as Serializable with the [Serializable] attribute.

public static byte[] SerializeToBytes<T>(T item)
{
    var formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
    using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
    {
        formatter.Serialize(stream, item);
        stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
        return stream.ToArray();
    }
}

---

public static object DeserializeFromBytes(byte[] bytes)
{
    var formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
    using (var stream = new MemoryStream(bytes))
    {
        return formatter.Deserialize(stream);
    }
}