Question

For work, the specification on my project is to use .Net 2.0 so I don’t get the handy CopyTo function brought about later on.

I need to copy the response stream from an HttpWebResponse to another stream (most likely a MemoryStream, but it could be any subclass of Stream). My normal tactic has been something along the lines of:

BufferedStream bufferedresponse = new BufferedStream(HttpResponse.GetResponseStream());
int count = 0;
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
do {
    count = bufferedresponse.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
    target.Write(buffer, 0, count);
} while (count > 0);
bufferedresponse.Close();

Are there more efficient ways to do this? Does the size of the buffer really matter? What is the best way to copy from one stream to another in .Net 2.0?

P.S. This is for downloading large, 200+ MB GIS tif images. Of course reliability is paramount.

Answer 1

This is a handy function. And yes, the buffer size matters. Increasing it might give you better performance on large files.

public static void WriteTo(Stream sourceStream, Stream targetStream)
{
       byte[] buffer = new byte[0x10000];
       int n;
       while ((n = sourceStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) != 0)
           targetStream.Write(buffer, 0, n);
}