Stream. What is a Stream? In the C# language, you use many different derived streams, such as FileStream and MemoryStream. However, the Stream type itself isn't usually used directly. It instead is an abstract base class for more derived streams.
Example. Because Stream is an abstract base class for other streams such as FileStream and MemoryStream, you can implicitly cast those streams to Stream types. Here, we introduce a method that receives a Stream formal parameter.
Note: You can pass instances of FileStream and MemoryStream to this method. We use the Stream abstraction to perform certain tasks.
MemoryStreamFileStreamFile.Open C# program that uses Stream type
using System;
using System.IO;
class Program
{
static void Main()
{
FileStream stream1 = File.Open("C:\\a", FileMode.Open);
Print(stream1);
MemoryStream stream2 = new MemoryStream(new byte[1234]);
Print(stream2);
}
static void Print(Stream stream)
{
Console.WriteLine(stream.Length);
Console.WriteLine(stream.Position);
}
}
Output
5469165
0
1234
0