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Using the C# system.io Namespace

  • Jun 2, 2009
Building effective C# disk I/O code isn't a simple matter, and is often overlooked or underestimated on big projects. Following a few straightforward rules, enterprise development and networking specialist Stephen B. Morris provides an on-ramp to this oft-neglected area.
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File I/O

Interacting with files and directories is one of those areas of programming that can be both subtle and potentially difficult. Some of the important issues: simply using the API, performance, and exception handling. In the case of C#, this language provides some powerful mechanisms. Even in these days of ubiquitous databases, there's still a huge amount of data stored in disk files. In fact, IBM reckons that about 15 petabytes of data is created every day—more than the entire contents of all the libraries in the U.S. Being able to create, modify, and delete disk data is an important skill today, and is likely to remain so in the future.

On a deeper level, any form of persistent storage (including databases) is a mechanism by which data can outlive the process or application that created it. In this context, C# I/O code provides an on-demand gateway to your disk data. As you'll see in this article, there are many subtleties to effective I/O programming.

NOTE

This article makes a slight departure from my previous C# articles, in that I used the free download of Microsoft Visual C# 2008. Normally, I use the SharpDevelop IDE, but for this article I thought a temporary change from the open source approach might be in order. The Microsoft tool includes powerful code-completion and wizard features that I'd like you to see. So, if you want to follow along with the code, you should be able to use either SharpDevelop or Microsoft Visual C# 2008.

The complete working code for this article is available as a downloadable source.zip file. The source code is composed of just one file, so if you like you can build the source code from scratch. To do this, you just need to create a Visual C# solution or a SharpDevelop solution. Simply drop the one supplied source code file into your solution. Once this is done, the project should build and run successfully.

Now let's get started with an example of directory creation.

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