System.IO.Stream (abstract class)

The two fundumental operations on streams are:

• Reading data from a stream (usually into a Byte[])
• Writing Data into a stream (usually from a Byte[])

Some streams have a third fundamental operation: moving to a specific location within the stream. A typical example for such a stream is a file. An example, where moving to a specific position doesn't make lot of sense is a TCP/IP connection.

In order to find out which operations are possible, a stream provides the following three methods:

• CanRead()
• CanWrite()
• CanSeek()

This example uses a stream to write an XML document.