Question

I am trying to find out what FolderInformation and FileInformation are for and how to use them. So far I learned that FolderInformation is more to act on the folder itself and StorageFolder for the folder contents (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13944488/in-metro-whats-the-difference-between-folderinformation-and-storagefolder). But both classes have similar members like CreateFileAsync which makes the difference a bit blurry.

Can someone explain what the purpose of FolderInformation and FileInformation actually is?

I would also appreciate a small example how to use this classes. There’s not much to find on the Internet.

Answer 1

If you examine a bit more the differences between FolderStorage and FolderInformation (same thing with the File counterparty), you will see that FolderInformation implements one more interface which is IStorageItemInformation.

Basically this interface will provide metadata information for the file or folder in question. For example in the case of a MP3 music file you could retrieve basic ID3 tag information (track name, artist, …) and in the case of a JPG image file you could retrieve basic EXIF information (shot date, …).

Also it provides an event to listen to changes that might occur on those information. I can imagine this can be really useful to update display information in a music player or photo viewer.