Mono Kick Start

Streams

Streams are a fundamental concept. In general, streams are nothing more than a sequence of data. The way streams work in C# is pretty similar to Java. Most I/O functions provided by the Mono framework are based on streams, which shows how important dealing with streams is.

Mono provides a set of efficient classes for working with streams. One thing that these classes have in common is that they've all been derived from a parent class called Stream.

Let's see the classes we're talking about (Stream and read/write classes):

• BinaryReader: Reads basic data types

• BinaryWriter: Writes basic data types

• BufferedStream: Provides mechanisms to deal with buffered streams

• CryptoStream: Provides interfaces to algorithms for encrypting data

• FileStream ...