FIFO/Queue buffer specialising in byte streams

Question

Is there any .NET data structure/combination of classes that allows for byte data to be appended to the end of a buffer but all peeks and reads are from the start, shortenin

Answer 1

I'll post a stripped out copy of some logic i wrote for a project at work once. The advantage of this version is that it works with a linked list of buffered data and therefore you dont have to cache huge amounts of memory and/or copy memory around when reading. furthermore, its thread safe and behaves like a network stream, that is: When reading when there is no data available: Wait untill there is data available or timeout. Also, when reading x amounts of bytes and there are only y amounts of bytes, return after reading all bytes. I hope this helps!

    public class SlidingStream : Stream
{
    #region Other stream member implementations

    ...

    #endregion Other stream member implementations

    public SlidingStream()
    {
        ReadTimeout = -1;
    }

    private readonly object _writeSyncRoot = new object();
    private readonly object _readSyncRoot = new object();
    private readonly LinkedList> _pendingSegments = new LinkedList>();
    private readonly ManualResetEventSlim _dataAvailableResetEvent = new ManualResetEventSlim();

    public int ReadTimeout { get; set; }

    public override int Read(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count)
    {
        if (_dataAvailableResetEvent.Wait(ReadTimeout))
            throw new TimeoutException("No data available");

        lock (_readSyncRoot)
        {
            int currentCount = 0;
            int currentOffset = 0;

            while (currentCount != count)
            {
                ArraySegment segment = _pendingSegments.First.Value;
                _pendingSegments.RemoveFirst();

                int index = segment.Offset;
                for (; index < segment.Count; index++)
                {
                    if (currentOffset < offset)
                    {
                        currentOffset++;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        buffer[currentCount] = segment.Array[index];
                        currentCount++;
                    }
                }

                if (currentCount == count)
                {
                    if (index < segment.Offset + segment.Count)
                    {
                        _pendingSegments.AddFirst(new ArraySegment(segment.Array, index, segment.Offset + segment.Count - index));
                    }
                }

                if (_pendingSegments.Count == 0)
                {
                    _dataAvailableResetEvent.Reset();

                    return currentCount;
                }
            }

            return currentCount;
        }
    }

    public override void Write(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count)
    {
        lock (_writeSyncRoot)
        {
            byte[] copy = new byte[count];
            Array.Copy(buffer, offset, copy, 0, count);

            _pendingSegments.AddLast(new ArraySegment(copy));

            _dataAvailableResetEvent.Set();
        }   
    }
}