Summary

We've covered a lot of useful classes and techniques in this chapter. The .NET Framework class library is full of useful feature-rich classes, and over the last two chapters, we've picked out and studied those that you'll use most frequently when creating ASP.NET applications. Specifically, we looked at:

• The File and Directory classes, which provide static methods for enumerating files and directories.

• The FileInfo and DirectoryInfo classes, which enable you to work with a single file or directory. For the most part, they provide equivalent functionality to File and Directory classes, but deal with a single object.

• How backing stores are responsible for the physical storage and management of bytes of data.

• How the Stream class is the programmatic interface used to communicate to a backing store Each backing store such as the file system or memory buffer provides its own class derived from Stream . This implements the basic functionality required from a backing store, and can also provide additional methods and properties specific to a given backing store.

• How the reader and writer classes layer functionality over a stream to abstract you from the underlying byte representation of primitive types, such as characters , strings, and floats.

• How the reader and writer classes use internal buffers for performance reasons.

• The System.Net classes, and how they provide a powerful way of writing network applications. The classes are safe to use in an ASP.NET page and are scalable.

• How to use regular expressions as a means of searching data using simple or very complex patterns.

In the next chapter, we'll look at building business objects.