At work I have a situation where I have some binary data allocated in the native code. It’s pretty much a raw char*. I then would like to access that same information from the managed side. But how? Of course I can just copy the data to a byte[] but that’s just wasteful.

I did some googling around and found the obvious solution - UnmanagedMemoryStream. It can take pointers, or a SafeBuffer. The latter is basically a smart wrapper around memory handle. Take a look at the code I came up with. I hope somebody will find it useful. It’s still work in progress and can use some love, so any comments are welcome.

I needed to pass the std::unique_ptr as r-value, otherwise the linker complains (thunks for non-existent copy constructor). I still need to clean this code up to handle custom deleters. But it serves my needs for now.

Edit: There is a bug in this code. Can you spot it? ;)