Converting floating values to byte form

Converting floating values to byte form

I am designing a program to communicate with another one over the network. I am trying to put single/double values into bytes/buffer (4 or 8 bytes) to transfer over the network. On the other end, the bytes eill be converted back to the floating values.

In C it can be simply done with a cast from float * to char *, but I don't think VB.NET works this way. Do you have an easy way of converting floating(single/double) values to its "byte" form stored?

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You can convert many of the intrinsic data types to and from an array of bytes and the actual type using the System.BitConverter class. Specifically look at the GetBytes method, and then the ToDouble and ToSingle methods to convert the byte array back to the appropriate type.

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This was first published in August 2005

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