How to: Load Unmanaged Resources into a Byte Array

 

The new home for Visual Studio documentation is Visual Studio 2017 Documentation on docs.microsoft.com.

The latest version of this topic can be found at How to: Load Unmanaged Resources into a Byte Array.

This topic discusses several ways to load unmanaged resources into a Byte array.

Example

If you know the size of your unmanaged resource, you can preallocate a CLR array and then load the resource into the array using a pointer to the array block of the CLR array.

// load_unmanaged_resources_into_Byte_array.cpp  
// compile with: /clr  
using namespace System;  
void unmanaged_func( unsigned char * p ) {  
   for ( int i = 0; i < 10; i++ )  
      p[ i ] = i;  
}  
  
public ref class A {  
public:  
   void func() {  
      array<Byte> ^b = gcnew array<Byte>(10);  
      pin_ptr<Byte> p =  &b[ 0 ];  
      Byte * np = p;  
      unmanaged_func( np );   // pass pointer to the block of CLR array.  
      for ( int i = 0; i < 10; i++ )  
         Console::Write( b[ i ] );  
      Console::WriteLine();  
   }  
};  
  
int main() {  
   A^ g = gcnew A;  
   g->func();  
}  

0123456789  

Example

This sample shows how to copy data from an unmanaged memory block to a managed array.

// load_unmanaged_resources_into_Byte_array_2.cpp  
// compile with: /clr  
using namespace System;  
using namespace System::Runtime::InteropServices;  
  
#include <string.h>  
int main() {  
   char buf[] = "Native String";  
   int len = strlen(buf);  
   array<Byte> ^byteArray = gcnew array<Byte>(len + 2);  
  
   // convert any native pointer to IntPtr by doing C-Style cast  
   Marshal::Copy( (IntPtr)buf, byteArray, 0, len );  
}  

See Also

Using C++ Interop (Implicit PInvoke)