Beginning C# 7 Programming with Visual Studio 2017

20Files

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• Discovering the File and Directory classes
• Understanding how .NET uses streams to access files
• Writing to and reading from a file
• Reading and writing compressed files
• Serializing and deserializing objects
• Monitoring files and directories for changes

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found on this book's webpage on Wrox.com on the Download Code tab. The code can also be found at http://github.com/benperk/BeginningCSharp7. The code is in the Chapter20 folder and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

Files can be a great way to store data between instances of your application, or they can be used to transfer data between applications. User and application configuration settings can be stored to be retrieved the next time your application is run.

This chapter shows you how to use files effectively in your applications, touching on the major classes used to create, read from, and write to files, and the supporting classes used to manipulate the file system from C# code. Although you won't examine all of the classes in detail, this chapter goes into enough depth to give you a good idea of the concepts and fundamentals.

FILE CLASSES FOR INPUT AND OUTPUT

Reading and writing files is an essential way to get data into your C# program (input) and send data out of your program (output). Because files are used for input and output, the file classes are contained ...