Chapter 16: Working with Other Base Classes

Overview

The last chapter introduced the .NET Framework class library and spent a fair amount of time looking at the collection classes it provides for dealing with common data structures such as lists, queues, and stacks. In this chapter, we'll continue our examination of the class library, this time looking at the classes it provides for working with directories, files, regular expressions, and web requests .

This chapter will cover:

• The contents of the file system, working with directories and files.

• Reading and writing data from backing stores such as the file system or memory.

• Retrieving data in a generic way using stream objects.

• Using regular expressions to parse text and extract values using captures.

Let's look at the classes used for working with the file system.