IO 101: Which are the main differences between TextWriter, FileStream and StreamWriter?

Question

Let me first apologize if this question could sound perhaps sort of amateurish for the seasoned programmers among you, the thing is I\'ve been having many arguments about th

Answer 1

The FileStream class manages getting a handle to a file and opening it for reading or writing and other filesystem functions. BinaryWriter writes binary data to a stream and StreamWriter writes character data to a stream. They both can use a FileStream object to write binary or character data to files.

TextWriter is the base class that StreamWriter inherits from. A TextWriter is intended to take a type and output a string using its Write method. StreamWriter's implementation of the TextWriter.Write method writes a string, or character data, to a stream. BinaryWriter does not inherit TextWriter because it does not write character data to a stream.