I use this extension class:
public static class StreamExtensions
{
public static byte[] ReadAllBytes(this Stream instream)
{
if (instream is MemoryStream)
return ((MemoryStream) instream).ToArray();
using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
{
instream.CopyTo(memoryStream);
return memoryStream.ToArray();
}
}
}
Just copy the class to your solution and you can use it on every stream:
byte[] bytes = myStream.ReadAllBytes()
Works great for all my streams and saves a lot of code! Of course you can modify this method to use some of the other approaches here to improve performance if needed, but I like to keep it simple.