Even people very new to .Net will have run into streams (classes that derive from System.IO.Stream) in the framework. I’d think the most common usage of streams is file I/O, but it’s really just a way to handle a sequence of bytes. You can read from streams, write to streams and even seek around in them finding what you want (if the backing store supports that). You’ll find a ton of examples of stream usage throughout the framework, but why are they so useful?
A few months back I was working on a side project with a co-worker that dealt with web services and stumbled onto an interesting behavior of Synchronous web service calls in relation to timeouts. It seems that the timeout property on the SoapHttpClientProtocol class (which is used as the base class for your web services when VS.Net generates a proxy class for you) acts much like the ADO.Net CommandTimeout property on the command objects.
Okay, so after almost a two week break it is time to finally wrap up the third and final part of the .Net 2.0 SDK tools series. This series has covered many of the executables found within the bin folder of the .Net 2.0 SDK. The first part covered some tools that were probably pretty familiar to most .Net developers and second part covered some that probably were not well known.