Opening a file stored in a database in .NET

Question

I'm storing a Word document in a SQL Server 2005 database in a varbinary(max) column. Is there a way to open this document from a VB.NET Windows Forms application without serialising to a file first (i.e. directly from the byte array I've read from the database)?

Answer 1

Not really. You need to treat it like an e-mail attachment, where the file is generally copied to a temp folder that is cleaned out periodically.

Answer 2

Depends on what's reading it. If it's Word, you'll probably have to serialize to a file, but if it's a function or library that can take an IO.Stream then you could wrap a new MemoryStream around the byte array and pass that.