Sams Teach Yourself Visual C#® 2010 in 24 Hours

Hour 13. Using Files and Streams

What You’ll Learn in This Hour

• Files and Directories

• Reading and Writing Data

• Binary Files

• Buffered Streams

• Text Files

In Hour 9, “Working with Arrays and Collections,” and Hour 12, “Understanding Query Expressions,” you learned how applications could work with data stored in collections and how to query and manipulate that data. Although these are common activities, many applications need to store or retrieve data from files on a disk.

The .NET Framework treats files as a stream of data. A stream is a sequential flow of packets of data, represented as bytes. Data streams have an underlying storage medium, typically called a backing store, which provides a source for the stream. Fortunately, the ...