automatically zip/unzip files in vb or vb.net

Question

just as the title says i want to zip/unzip files using vb ocde to make a standalone vb application. I saw a couple out there but didnt really know how to work with them. Does anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

Check out DotNetZip for zip functions: http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com/

It's a simple matter of referencing the DLL for your project then look at the VB examples to get started.

Answer 2

You can try our Rebex ZIP component. The most common operations like zipping or unzipping file can be written in single line of code:

Imports Rebex.IO.Compression

' add all *.TXT files from the local directory C:\Data\ ' 
' to the directory \Data-2010 (within the Zip file) '
' (ZIP archive C:\archive.zip doesn't have to exist) '
ZipArchive.Add("C:\archive.zip", "C:\Data\*.txt", "\Data-2010")

' extract whole content of the ZIP archive to the existing local directory C:\Data '
ZipArchive.ExtractAll("C:\archive.zip", "C:\Data")

A common free alternative is SharpZipLib, but you will have to write quite more code - adding file or whole directory to ZIP archive is described e.g. in following Keith Rull's blogpost