BASIC INSTINCTS: Programming I/O with Streams in Visual Basic .NET

摘要

If you are just now migrating from Visual Basic" 6.0 to Visual Basic .NET, be prepared for a change, because the way you program file I/O is very different. The good news is that an idiosyncratic, proprietary approach has been replaced by an elegant and reusable one that has become an industry standard. I/O programming changes in both Visual Basic .NET and in the Microsoft" .NET Framework represent far more than just new syntax and method names. There's a complete paradigm shift because everything is based on the concept of a stream. In this column, I will introduce stream-based programming and the .NET Framework classes associated with it. Along the way, I will walk through several practical scenarios. You'll see that streams create a consistent I/O programming style regardless of the source or destination of your data.