Streams in C#

• Stream is the abstract base class of all streams.
• A stream is an abstraction over a sequence of bytes.
• Streams are classified as either byte streams or character streams.
• Streams involve three fundamental operations:
  • You can read from streams. Reading is the transfer of data from a stream into a data structure, such as an array of bytes.
  • You can write to streams. Writing is the transfer of data from a data structure into a stream.
  • Streams can support seeking. Seeking refers to querying and modifying the current position within a stream.

Some of the classes

• Byte streams
  • FileStream
  • MemoryStream
  • BufferedStream
• Character streams
  • TextReader
  • TextWriter
  • StreamReader
  • StreamWriter

What is a buffer?

A buffer represents a block of bytes in memory where you can temporarily store transient data.

A buffer helps in minimizing the number of calls your application makes to read and write data from and to the file system.

MemoryStream vs BufferedStream

BufferedStream is a class that provides buffering functionality to improve the performance of read and write operations on other streams.

MemoryStream is a class that represents a stream backed by a block of memory, allowing you to read from or write to the memory as if it were a stream.

---

Links

• Stream Class