C++ class via UDP to be used in C#, what are the options?

Question

I am receiving data via UDP from a C/C++ application. This application is doing a memcpy of the class into a buffer and throwing it our way. Our application is written in C# and I need to somehow make sense of the data. We have access to the header files of the structures - everything is basically a struct or an enum. We can't change the format the data comes in and the header files are likely to change fairly often.

I have considered re-writing our comms classes in C++ to receive the data and then I have more control of its serialisation, but that will take a long time and my C++ is rusty, not to mention I don't have a lot of experience with C++ threading which would be a requirement.

I have also created a few prototype C++ libraries with the provided header files to be accessed via C#, but I can't quite get my head around how I actually create and use an actual instance of the class in C# itself (every time I look into this, all I see are extern function calls, not the use of external types).

I have also looked into Marshalling. However, as the data is liable to change quite often, I think this is a last resort and feels quite manual.

Does anyone know of any options or have any more targeted reading or advice on this matter?

Answer 1

Why not use Google Protocol Buffers on each end i.e. c++ and c#. You would take your c++ definition and let PB do all the serialisation for you.

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. more...

It works across different OSs even where primitive type conversation would normally be a problem.