Yesterday I was helping a friend of mine figure out what value to pass in to
a function where the argument was of type Stream. System.IO is not a very
intuitive namespace to begin with. Also, it's not readily apparent what to do in
this case if you
aren't familiar with inheritance (he's one of those VB guys). Specifically
the concept that if you have a class C which derives from B which derives from
A, if the argument type requirement is B then you can only pass in a B or a C.
Not to mention that in this case it was more like an abstract class B required
where you had to pass in an instance of C because C is a B and you can't
instantiate B. Got it? :-)
Anyway, I told him to look into passing a MemoryStream to the function. He
then asked how to get a String into a MemoryStream, and since we were talking
over IM, I promptly ran a
Google search for "string into memorystream". The result in the list was the
MSDN documentation for a MemoryStream class. He then replied, "well,
gee...that's intuitive." Sensing the sarcasm, I decided to look at the example
code and it was a lot more bloated (about 25 lines of sample code) than he was
looking for. Fortunately, I can speak VB when I absolutely have to...
Dim memStream As New
System.IO.MemoryStream(XMLMsg.Length)
memStream.Write(System.Text.UTF8Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(XMLMsg), 0,
XMLMsg.Length)
Just thought I'd share in case my blog ends up being indexed by Google and
another poor SOB goes looking. Then again, if you're a VB guy, why write
it in 2 lines of code when you can write it in 25. Just kidding. :-)
