AlphaFS A .NET library providing more complete Win32 file system functionality to the .NET platform than the standard System.IO classes
Download

AlphaFS Ranking & Summary

AlphaFS Tags

Library API System.IO.FileInfo Class System.IO.FileInfo vss io System.Net.IPAddress Class VSS API .NET classes file system library .Net platform Net Framework classes .NET AssemblyInfo File Drop.io socket classes functionality Win32 library recommender system library net file

AlphaFS Description

The AlphaFS was designed to be a .NET library providing more complete Win32 file system functionality to the .NET platform than the standard System.IO classes. Features highlights: creating hardlinks, accessing hidden volumes, enumeration of volumes, transactional file operations and much more. The file system support in .NET is pretty good for most uses. However there are a few shortcomings, which this library tries to alleviate. The most notable deficiency of the standard .NET file system support was discovered in our attempts to work with the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). VSS creates snapshots of volumes, but on Windows XP does not allow exposing this snapshot as a standard drive letter. There is a hack using the CreateDosDevice Win32 API function, but the solution is not very elegant. haFS provides a namespace (Alphaleonis.Win32.Filesystem) containing a number of classes. Most notable are replications of the System.IO.File, System.IO.Directory and System.IO.Path, all with support for the extended-length paths discussed above. They also contain extensions to these, and there are more options for several functions. Another thing AlphaFS brings to the table is support for transactional NTFS (TxF). Almost every method in these classes exist in two versions. One normal, and one that can work with transactions, more specifically the kernel transaction manager. This means that file operations can be performed using the simple, lightweight KTM on NTFS file systems, through .NET, using the interface of the standard classes we are all used to. AlphaFS also contains a little security related functionality (in Alphaleonis.Win32.Security), providing the ability to enable token privileges for a user, which may be necessary for eg. changing ownership of a file. This is an alpha release, and it is likely to contain bugs, and interfaces may change as the library evolves. The library comes with full API documentation in CHM and Windows Help 2.x format.

AlphaFS Related Software