Exposing I/O as a Stream

Exposing various I/O classes as a Stream is trivial. Simply call the AsStream() extension method.

WebSockets

Stream stream = webSocket.AsStream();

You can now read and write on this stream as if it were your primary API to your web socket.

Flushing this stream is not necessary, as each write to the stream goes immediately to the web socket, which has no buffer and sends all messages immediately.

Message boundaries

Web sockets have a concept of a message boundary, such that you can send several packets over a web socket and mark the last packet as the end of an individual message so the receiver knows when to combine all the packets together to reconstitute the full message. Streams do not have this characteristic in general and their API offers no way to detect or create message boundaries. It is therefore recommended that a web socket be wrapped as a .NET Stream only when message boundaries are not important to your network protocol.

Pipes

When you have a PipeReader, a PipeWriter or a IDuplexPipe, you may find that you want to read/write data using Stream APIs. The AsStream() extension method for each of these types will return a Stream object whose I/O methods will leverage the underlying pipe.

The following demonstrates wrapping a PipeReader in a Stream and reading from it:

PipeReader reader; // obtained some other way
Stream readerStream = reader.AsStream();
byte[] buffer = new byte[10];
int bytesRead = await readerStream.ReadAsync(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);

The following demonstrates wrapping a PipeWriter in a Stream and writing to it:

PipeWriter writer; // obtained some other way
Stream writerStream = writer.AsStream();
byte[] buffer = { 0x1, 0x2, 0x3 };
await writerStream.WriteAsync(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);

Given an IDuplexPipe (which allows two-way communication over a @System.IO.Pipelines.PipeReader/@System.IO.Pipelines.PipeWriter pair), we can wrap that as a Stream and use both the read and write methods on that too:

IDuplexPipe pipe; // obtained some other way
Stream duplexStream = pipe.AsStream();

// Write something
byte[] writeBuffer = { 0x1, 0x2, 0x3 };
await writerStream.WriteAsync(writeBuffer, 0, writeBuffer.Length);

// Read something
byte[] readBuffer = new byte[10];
int bytesRead = await readerStream.ReadAsync(readBuffer, 0, buffer.Length);

ReadOnlySequence<byte>

A ReadOnlySequence<byte> can be exposed as a seekable, read-only Stream. This enables progressive decoding or deserializing data without allocating a single array for the entire sequence.

ReadOnlySequence<byte> sequence; // obtained some other way
Stream stream = sequence.AsStream();
var reader = new StreamReader(stream);
while ((string line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)
{
    Console.WriteLine(line);
}

IBufferWriter<byte>

If you're building up a ReadOnlySequence<byte> using Sequence<byte>, or have another IBufferWriter<byte> instance, you can add to that sequence with Stream APIs using AsStream():

var sequence = new Sequence<byte>();
var stream = sequence.AsStream();
stream.Write(new byte[] { 1, 2, 3 }, 0, 3);
var readOnlySequence = sequence.AsReadOnlySequence;
Assert.Equal(3, readOnlySequence.Length);