Discussion on: Looking for a helpful dotnet library

[Katie Nelson]

FrontEnd is usually easier to work with b/c everything is stringly-typed (ie everything is a string). Very inefficient but it's easy to work with.

Easy, but highly prone to people's comments like Why did use use that font?

First, parsing binary is where protocols come into play. A protocol is just a convention for structuring data. If you know the protocol used, you can look up its structure and build your own serialize and deserialize methods to match.

I know the structure. It looks like I need a BinaryFormatter to get the array into a MemoryStream

Hope you're comfortable working in a live debugger. The ability to step through the parser one-step at a time and address mistakes precisely will make the work go a lot faster.

Yes, I've been working in Visual Studio for a while and can set conditional breakpoints, step through my code and watch variables. (It's how I really learn how C# works!)

Hopefully, you can find documentation for the format/protocol used.
Reverse-engineer a protocol from binary is considerably more difficult. I've been there, it's not fun.

I just hope this doc I have is accurate.
Evan, it's so nice of you to help me out. Thanks so much for the support.