Streams

When using streams, it is best to think of the different types of streams in an abstract sense. They are all a stream or a block of data that you can write to or read from. The medium that holds this data differentiates the different stream classes. Therefore, a FileStream hosts a block of data in a file; a MemoryStream hosts a block of data in memory. The methods by which you read from and write to a stream are the same. The following examples will use a FileStream; however, using a MemoryStream or NetworkStream will be, for the most part, identical.

Whereas the streaming classes encapsulate the block of data, one requires readers and writers to read from a stream and to write to a stream, respectively. For a text-based stream, these ...

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