Close a filestream without Flush()

Question

Can I close a file stream without calling Flush (in C#)? I understood that Close and Dispose calls the Flush method first.

Answer 1

You don't have to call Flush() on Close()/Dispose(), FileStream will do it for you as you can see from its source code:

http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/io/filestream.cs,e23a38af5d11ffffd3

    [System.Security.SecuritySafeCritical]  // auto-generated
    protected override void Dispose(bool disposing)
    {
        // Nothing will be done differently based on whether we are 
        // disposing vs. finalizing.  This is taking advantage of the
        // weak ordering between normal finalizable objects & critical
        // finalizable objects, which I included in the SafeHandle 
        // design for FileStream, which would often "just work" when 
        // finalized.
        try {
            if (_handle != null && !_handle.IsClosed) {
                // Flush data to disk iff we were writing.  After 
                // thinking about this, we also don't need to flush
                // our read position, regardless of whether the handle
                // was exposed to the user.  They probably would NOT 
                // want us to do this.
                if (_writePos > 0) {
                    FlushWrite(!disposing); // <- Note this
                }
            }
        }
        finally {
            if (_handle != null && !_handle.IsClosed)
                _handle.Dispose();

            _canRead = false;
            _canWrite = false;
            _canSeek = false;
            // Don't set the buffer to null, to avoid a NullReferenceException
            // when users have a race condition in their code (ie, they call
            // Close when calling another method on Stream like Read).
            //_buffer = null;
            base.Dispose(disposing);
        }
    }