.NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference, Volume 1: Base Class Library and Extended Numerics Library

System.IO

The modern operating system as we know it was first developed to provide applications with prefabricated I/O operations on the (at the time) newfangled things called disks. Providing programmers with a logically contiguous stream of bytes called a “file”, regardless of the underlying hardware, was an enormous advance and saved programmers a great deal of time. The extra system overhead was a small price to pay. The System.IO namespace contains classes that provide low-level file system I/O operations.

The cornerstone of the I/O system is the abstract base class Stream, which represents a logically contiguous sequence of bytes. All actual I/O operations use classes that derive from Stream. This base class defines abstract methods for ...