Most efficient way of reading data from a stream

Question

I have an algorithm for encrypting and decrypting data using symmetric encryption. anyways when I am about to decrypt, I have:

CryptoStream cs = new CryptoSt         


        

Answer 1

You could read in chunks:

using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
{
    byte[] buffer = new byte[2048]; // read in chunks of 2KB
    int bytesRead;
    while((bytesRead = cs.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
    {
        stream.Write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
    }
    byte[] result = stream.ToArray();
    // TODO: do something with the result
}

Answer 2

Since you are storing everything in memory anyway you can just use a MemoryStream and CopyTo():

using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
{
    cs.CopyTo(ms);
    return ms.ToArray();
}

CopyTo() will require .NET 4