C# – creating multiline textbox using Html.Helper function

There is actually a (subtle) difference between the two. Imagine you have the following code in File1.cs:

// File1.cs
using System;
namespace Outer.Inner
{
    class Foo
    {
        static void Bar()
        {
            double d = Math.PI;
        }
    }
}

Now imagine that someone adds another file (File2.cs) to the project that looks like this:

// File2.cs
namespace Outer
{
    class Math
    {
    }
}

The compiler searches Outer before looking at those using directives outside the namespace, so it finds Outer.Math instead of System.Math. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?), Outer.Math has no PI member, so File1 is now broken.

This changes if you put the using inside your namespace declaration, as follows:

// File1b.cs
namespace Outer.Inner
{
    using System;
    class Foo
    {
        static void Bar()
        {
            double d = Math.PI;
        }
    }
}

Now the compiler searches System before searching Outer, finds System.Math, and all is well.

Some would argue that Math might be a bad name for a user-defined class, since there's already one in System; the point here is just that there is a difference, and it affects the maintainability of your code.

It's also interesting to note what happens if Foo is in namespace Outer, rather than Outer.Inner. In that case, adding Outer.Math in File2 breaks File1 regardless of where the using goes. This implies that the compiler searches the innermost enclosing namespace before it looks at any using directive.

It really depends on whether or not you can trust s.Length. For many streams, you just don't know how much data there will be. In such cases - and before .NET 4 - I'd use code like this:

public static byte[] ReadFully(Stream input)
{
    byte[] buffer = new byte[16*1024];
    using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
    {
        int read;
        while ((read = input.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
        {
            ms.Write(buffer, 0, read);
        }
        return ms.ToArray();
    }
}

With .NET 4 and above, I'd use Stream.CopyTo, which is basically equivalent to the loop in my code - create the MemoryStream, call stream.CopyTo(ms) and then return ms.ToArray(). Job done.

I should perhaps explain why my answer is longer than the others. Stream.Read doesn't guarantee that it will read everything it's asked for. If you're reading from a network stream, for example, it may read one packet's worth and then return, even if there will be more data soon. BinaryReader.Read will keep going until the end of the stream or your specified size, but you still have to know the size to start with.

The above method will keep reading (and copying into a MemoryStream) until it runs out of data. It then asks the MemoryStream to return a copy of the data in an array. If you know the size to start with - or think you know the size, without being sure - you can construct the MemoryStream to be that size to start with. Likewise you can put a check at the end, and if the length of the stream is the same size as the buffer (returned by MemoryStream.GetBuffer) then you can just return the buffer. So the above code isn't quite optimised, but will at least be correct. It doesn't assume any responsibility for closing the stream - the caller should do that.

See this article for more info (and an alternative implementation).