Marshalling

[3bood ghzawi]

Hi all, i asking about marshalling, what it is means, and why we need it??? I face this statment at some code, but i don't know exactly what it means ..; < // Marshal pointer into a struct PcapUnmanagedStructures.pcap_if pcap_if_unmanaged = (PcapUnmanagedStructures.pcap_if)Marshal.PtrToStructure(nextDevPtr, typeof(PcapUnmanagedStructures.pcap_if)); >

[DaveyM69]

I'm no expert so this is a rough overview. I'm sure Luc will be along soon to offer a much better description! Marshalling is data transformation. Things in the managed world are different from the unmanaged world and marshalling takes care of transforming the data so we can pass it between the two worlds. Unmanaged code often uses pointers to pass the references to values rather than the values themselves. These pointers are marshalled back to managed code to an IntPtr. To get the actual value pointed to, we can use the Marshal class to transform the data at the given reference to a structure as in your example.

Dave
BTW, in software, hope and pray is not a viable strategy. (Luc Pattyn)
Why are you using VB6? Do you hate yourself? (Christian Graus)

[Luc Pattyn]

That is just fine, no way to improve on it. ;)

Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles]

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I only read code that is properly formatted, adding PRE tags is the easiest way to obtain that.
[The QA section does it automatically now, I hope we soon get it on regular forums as well]

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