Beginning ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix®

Chapter 8

Working with Files and Images

What you will learn in this chapter:

• How to create and modify files and folders
• Generating a Google sitemap
• How to use the WebImage helper

In the last chapter, you learned how to save text files that your users choose to upload to your site. There is a lot more to learn about files within ASP.NET Web Pages, which is why the topic deserves a chapter of its own. You can, for example, generate your own text files, or modify existing files. You can copy them and delete them. You will learn how to do this in the next few pages. You will also learn about other types of files that you can work with, and a number of ways to deliver those to your users. You will specifically learn how to create one type of XML file — a Google sitemap. Then, in the second part of the chapter, you will work in more detail with image files by using a helper specifically created to simplify these kinds of tasks.

Creating and Modifying Files

There are three primary classes that help you work with files and folders. You met one in the previous chapter — the Path class. The others are the File class and the Directory class, which, like the Path class, are used to house a number of related utility methods. None of the classes is intended to be instantiated directly. All of the methods exposed by these classes are static methods.

There are a huge number of file types that you might want to work with when developing your Web Pages application. Any text-based file can be ...