I was just thinking about the first time I really *got* streaming. I couldn’t get past the idea of something like a SQLDataReader being a container or a fileStream being a container. Finally one day it just clicked – it’s a pipe. I remember last spring and summer when I gave a Streaming in .NET talk a number of times, I was very reliant on using my hands to describe this to attendees.

But truly, if you ever have a hard time explaining it to someone who just doesn’t get it … and that’s really only because it is very different from what they may have experienced so far as a developer … use the pipe image. Describe the stream as the pipe that the data is flowing through. Worked for me.

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