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I've known that GetBuffer() on a MemoryStream in C#/.NET has to be used with care, because, as the docs describe here , there can be unused bytes at the end, so you have to be sure to look only at the first MemoryStream.Length bytes in the buffer. But then I ran into a case yesterday where bytes at the beginning of the buffer were junk! Indeed, if you use a tool like reflector and look at ToArray() , you can see this: public virtual byte[] ToArray() { byte[] dst = new byte[this._length - this._origin]; Buffer.InternalBlockCopy(this._buffer, this._origin, dst, 0, this._length - this._origin); return dst; } So to do anything with the buffer returned by GetBuffer() , you really need to know _origin. The only problem is that _origin is private and there's no way to get at it... So my question is - what use is GetBuffer() on a MemoryStream() without some apriori knowledge of how the MemoryStream was constructed (which is what sets _origin)? It is this constructor, and only this constructor, that sets origin - for when you want a MemoryStream around a byte array starting at a particular index in the byte array: public MemoryStream(byte[] buffer, int index, int count, bool writable, bool publiclyVisible)

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