These following static methods of the NFile class aids you in working with the file system:

• Copy - lets you copy a file
• Move - lets you move a file, i.e. copy a file to another location and delete the original file
• Delete - lets you delete a file
• Exists - lets you check whether a file with a given name exists or not

All of these methods are also available as instance methods of the NFile class.

The NFile class provides the following properties:

• Path - the full path to the file, for example "C:\Documents\MyFile.txt". Note that this property can be null for some platforms (like Silverlight), which do not allow access to the file system.
• Name - the name of the file without the path information, for example for the file "C:\Documents\MyFile.txt", this method returns "MyFile.txt".
• Extension - the extension of the file without the dot, for example: "txt", "rtf", "docx", etc.
• Attributes - gets/sets the attributes of the file. The value is a flag enum and can contain a mask of one or more values like: ReadOnly, Hidden, System, Archive, etc.
• CreationTime - the time the file was created.
• LastAccessTime - the last time the file was accessed.
• LastWriteTime - the last time the file was written to.

The following static methods of the NFile class lets you create, read and write files:

• Create - creates a file for both reading and writing. If the file already exists it is overwritten.
• Open - opens an existing file or creates a new file for both reading and writing.
• OpenRead - opens a file for reading.
• OpenWrite - opens an existing file or creates a new file for writing.

The following example demonstrates how to read fully an UTF8 encoded text file:

string text;

using (Stream stream = NFile.OpenRead(@"C:\Documents\MyFile.txt"))
{
    byte[] data = NStreamHelpers.ReadToEnd(stream);
    text = NEncoding.UTF8.GetString(data);
}

NFile provides the following static files to work directly with files:

• ReadAllBytes - reads a file to a byte array.
• ReadAllText - reads a file as string using an optional text encoding (by default UTF-8).
• WriteAllBytes - writes a byte array to a file.
• WriteAllText - writes a string to a file using an optional text encoding (by default UTF-8).

For example to read a file as string using the default UTF-8, you can use the following line of code:

string text = NFile.ReadAllText(@"C:\Documents\MyFile.txt");