Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

20.8. The Abstract Stream Class

At this point, you have seen many ways to obtain FileStream, StreamReader, and StreamWriter objects, but you have yet to read data from or write data to a file using these types. To understand how to do this, you'll need to familiarize yourself with the concept of a stream. In the world of I/O manipulation, a stream represents a chunk of data flowing between a source and a destination. Streams provide a common way to interact with a sequence of bytes, regardless of what kind of device (e.g., file, network connection, and printer) stores or displays the bytes in question.

The abstract System.IO.Stream class defines several members that provide support for synchronous and asynchronous interactions with the storage ...