Warm greetings! This lesson introduces data streams, which are essentially continuous datasets. Imagine a weather station or a gaming application gathering data every second — both generate data streams! We will learn how to handle these data streams using C# by accessing individual elements, slicing segments, and converting these streams into strings for easier handling.

In C#, data streams can be represented using collections such as arrays or lists. We will use a class to encapsulate operations related to these data streams in our C# application. Let's consider a simple C# class named DataStream:

To use this, we create a sample data stream as an instance of our DataStream class, where each element is a dictionary with key-value pairs:

To look into individual elements of a data stream, we use zero-based indexing. The Get method we introduce below fetches the i-th element from the data stream:

Here's how we can use the Get method:

In essence, stream.Get(2) fetches us the dictionary with { "id": 3, "value": 300 }.

To fetch a range of elements, we can use slicing. C# offers several ways to achieve this, such as using LINQ to select a range from our data stream. Here's how you might implement a Slice method:

Here's a quick usage example:

For better readability, we may want to convert our data streams into strings. In C#, we can use String.Join along with JSON serialization for this. Below is the example of implementing the ToString method:

To demonstrate:

In this lesson, we explored data streams and how to represent and manipulate them using C# collections like lists. We crafted a class that encapsulates operations on data streams in C#, including accessing elements, slicing ranges, and converting streams to string representations.

Now it's time to apply your newfound knowledge in the practice exercises that follow!