Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET 2003 Kick Start

Using Streams

As you read the documentation on Visual Basic .NET, you will continually read about things called streams. A stream is simply a series of bytes to be read or written, just as a water stream is a series of water droplets (if you look very closely). There are several types of streams, some read-only, others read-write. The one benefit of them is that they all act more or less the same. For example, a file can be thought of as a stream. In this case, it's a stream of bytes written to disk. There are other streams that represent in-memory collections of bytes, network traffic, encrypted information, and many others. The benefit of learning the Stream object is that you learn it once, and then can apply that knowledge to many places ...