[Mono-dev] Endianess/serialization questions...

[Matthew N. White]

Hello all,

I am using mono to run a server application on Linux, and have a few
questions.  First of all, I am talking to the server from different machines
running Microsoft .NET, and am serializing certain objects used between the
two apps and sending them over the network.  I have two questions about this
scenario.

First, should I be concerned about serialization problems between mono/MS
generated serialized objects?  Everything appears to be working just fine
right now, but I just want to be sure.

Secondly, does the virtual machine for .NET/mono actually always use
big/little endian byte order, or does it depend wholly on the host
architecture?  In other words, would serialized objects be interpretable
between two machines, one running MS .NET, and the other running mono on a
big-endian machine (e.g., my server)?  Does anyone know if MS .NET runs on
anything other than little endian machines?  Basically, I just want to be
sure everything will "work" in strange scenarios that may come up, like
running the server/clients on differing endianess machines.

Does anyone know of any references that would be helpful to answer these
questions?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Matt