I have been working on a project that had two portions, one written in FreeBASIC, and the other in VB.NET. During the project it became necessary to have binary files that could be shared by both languages. My initial attempts failed but I finally found a method that worked well. In this tutorial I will attempt to explain how you can make binary files that both languages can access.
In FreeBASIC, structures are defined using the TYPE declaration. Here is a code sample…
Type _mytype
As Byte flag
As Integer x,y,z
End Type
When this structure is written to disk you might assume it will be 13 bytes long (3 Integers + 1 Byte = 13 bytes) but FreeBASIC will pad the flag field with 3 extra bytes to align the next field on an Integer boundary. To get the structure to write to disk exactly as is you need to specify a padding alignment of 1. You do this by adding the FIELD directive.
Type _mytype Field = 1
As Byte flag
As Integer x,y,z
End Type
The structure will now write to disk as it appears. Now let’s take a look at the corresponding structure in VB.NET. In VB.NET, the TYPE directive is now called STRUCTURE. To avoid the same padding and alignment issues that we had in FreeBASIC, VB.NET offers similar directives that can be specified when defining the structure.