Question

I need behaviour similar to Java’s RandomAccessFile(path, "rws") method, namely flushing data to disk as soon as it is written to the file.

I lean towards using BinaryWriter for my purposes, but it doesn’t have a way to specify the flushing behaviour.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

BinaryWriter is not sealed, and all of the Write methods are virtual. You could override them and add a call to Flush, for example:

public override void Write(byte value)
{
    base.Write(value);
    Flush(); // which is just: this.OutStream.Flush();
}

However! In most cases this would be really bad for performance. I don’t recommend it.

If you are using a StreamWriter or similar, then just set AutoFlush to true; job done; but again – this could really hurt performance.