C# little endian or big endian?

Question

In the documentation of hardware that allows us to control it via UDP/IP, I found the following fragment:

In this communication protocol, DWORD is a 4 bytes data, WORD is a 2 bytes data, BYTE is a single byte data. The storage format is little endian, namely 4 bytes (32bits) data is stored as: d7-d0, d15-d8, d23-d16, d31-d24; double bytes (16bits) data is stored as: d7-d0 , d15-d8.

I am wondering how this translates to C#? Do I have to convert stuff before sending it over? For example, if I want to send over a 32 bit integer, or a 4 character string?

Answer 1

C# itself doesn't define the endianness. Whenever you convert to bytes, however, you're making a choice. The BitConverter class has an IsLittleEndian field to tell you how it will behave, but it doesn't give the choice. The same goes for BinaryReader/BinaryWriter.

My MiscUtil library has an EndianBitConverter class which allows you to define the endianness; there are similar equivalents for BinaryReader/Writer. No online usage guide I'm afraid, but they're trivial :)

(EndianBitConverter also has a piece of functionality which isn't present in the normal BitConverter, which is to do conversions in-place in a byte array.)