Files, Streams, and IO

Abstract

In this chapter, we looked at how C# supports working with files and directories, using either the File and Directory or FileInfo and DirectoryInfo classes. We saw how to compose and manipulate file paths using the Path class and how to monitor a directory for changes and how to specify which changes we are interested in.

We also explored the support for streams, which are a general-purpose feature for reading and writing sequential byte data to a range of backing stores in a consistent way. Because working with byte values can be very tedious, we also looked at the reader and writer classes that make working with binary and textual representations of built-in type values a breeze.