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

20.2. The Directory(Info) and File(Info) Types

System.IO provides four classes that allow you to manipulate individual files, as well as interact with a machine's directory structure. The first two types, Directory and File, expose creation, deletion, copying, and moving operations using various static members. The closely related FileInfo and DirectoryInfo types expose similar functionality as instance-level methods (therefore, you must allocate them with the new keyword). In Figure 20-1, the Directory and File classes directly extend System.Object, while DirectoryInfo and FileInfo derive from the abstract FileSystemInfo type.

Figure 20.1. The File- and Directory-centric types

FileInfo and DirectoryInfo typically serve as better choices ...