Streams and serialization – understanding sequential data transmission

So with our fat, chunky JSON requests being broken up into tiny, sub-kilobyte packets, and sent over as an array of seemingly random, disjointed pieces of data, how can we possibly expect our recipients to process this data? Well, in C#, that's where the concept of a data stream comes in. Within the context of our application code, we can reliably assume that the transport layer will recompose our packets into a sequence of bits for us to consume as soon as it becomes available to us. So once we get that sequence of bits back, how do we consume it? As an IO stream!

The Stream class

If you've done any reading or writing of files on your...