C# 0 The Complete Reference

FixedBankRecord

 is the exact sum of its members, this may not be 

the case for all 

struct

s that have fixed-size buffers. C# is free to pad the overall length of 

structure so that it aligns on an even boundary (such as a word boundary) for efficiency 

reasons. Therefore, the overall length of a 

struct

 might be a few bytes greater than the sum 

of its fields, even when fixed-size buffers are used. In most cases, an equivalent C++ 

struct

would also use the same padding. However, be aware that a difference in this regard may 

be possible.

One last point: In the program, notice how the fixed-size buffer for 

Name

 is created:

public fixed byte Name[80]; // create a fixed-size buffer

Pay special attention to how the dimension of the array is specified. The brackets containing 

the array size follow the array name. This is C++-style syntax, and it differs from normal C# 

array declarations. This statement allocates 80 bytes of storage within each