Internal Bit-by-bit Decimal Format

I'm using Visual Basic .Net 2010 Express.I know, for example, that the Visual Basic ( IEEE 754 ) Internal bit-by-bit Double Format is: Bit 63 = Sign, Bits 62-52 = 11-bit Exponent, and Bits 51-0 = 52-bit Fractional Significand.But, I can't seem to find any documentation on the Internal bit-by-bit Decimal Format.There also don't seem to be any workable mechanisms for accessing the bit structure or copying the bits to another Format for internal processing and returning the result to the Decimal Format.[code]to separate the ULongVariable into bytes for convenient manipulation. A similar reverse process allows moving the manipulated bits back into the Signed Long Variable.But, methods like << and >> are not extendable to Decimals per the Microsoft Documentation ( and I tried them anyway, and confirmed that they don't work ). Nor does there appear to be any way to copy the 128-bit Decimal into two 64-bit Unsigned Long Variables, or vice-versa.

I could, of course, forgo the use of Decimals and define my own MDJDecimal consisting of two ULongs, but that seems a bit of an overkill, and its methods would likely incur significant development time, and would probably also be rather excessively slow and cumbersome.I know I could write a workable routine in Visual C++ .Net using the Unmanaged Native Assembler, but I don't know enough about how to integrate that with Visual Basic .Net code, and I don't want to irrevocably tie what I'm developing to the Intel platform.I might also be able to write it in Managed Visual C++ .Net, but, again, I don't know enough about how to integrate that with Visual Basic .Net.