Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

18.3. Reading and Writing with Streams

The .NET Framework makes it easy to create simple "flat" files in text or binary format. Unlike a database, these files don't have any internal structure (that's why they're called flat). Instead, these files are really just a list of whatever information you want to store.

18.3.1. Text Files

You can write to a file and read from a file using a StreamWriter and a StreamReader—dedicated classes that abstract away the process of file interaction. There really isn't much to it. You can create the StreamWriter and StreamReader classes on your own, or you can use one of the helpful static methods included in the File class, such as CreateText() or OpenText().

Here's an example that gets a StreamWriter for writing ...