Take Advantage of Streams and Formatters in VB.NET

When you first start learning VB.NET, one of the first things you may notice is the absence of "traditional" file I/O support in .NET. Microsoft has replaced the classic IO operations by stream operations. A stream is a simple concept that originated in the Unix world.

You can think of stream as a channel through which data flows from your application to a sequential data store (such as a file, a string, a byte array, or another stream), or vice versa. To understand why the traditional file I/O operations were replaced by streams, you must consider that not all data reside in files. Modern applications acquire data from many different data stores, including files, in-memory buffers and the Internet. The stream analogy enables applications to access all these data stores with the same programming model. There's no need to learn how to use Sockets to access a file on a remote Web server. You can establish a stream between your application and a remote resource and read the bytes as the server sends them.