Recommend a good archiver library? | Tech Off

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

Soon I'm going to scour the market for a good .NET library that allows me easy access to common archiver formats - ZIP, RAR, CAB and anything else that's in common usage. I figured I'd toss it here, see if anyone has any good experience with such a library.

My requirements:
1) Supports .NET 2.0 and (soon) 3.5.
2) Build for high performance and robustness. This will run as a server process and do an awful lot of work.
3) Support concurrent operations - single threaded is *so* 90's.
4) Support piped memory streams. I can't guarantree all my files will sit on a local/UNC disk, and they may come from different sources, so IStream it shall be.

Anyone worked with a good one? I'd rather hear of personal experiences, since I can probably google up 5-6 solutions myself. These is the sort of thing where a press release can never really give you the full story.

odujosh
Need Microsoft SUX now!

I been using for ZIP

http://www.winzip.com/prodpagecl.htm

You can use Process object to make this part of any .NET app.

.NET support gZip natively.

Also

http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/

Supports
Zip, GZip, Tar and BZip2 library

Cab files I never had to save to. Anyone know if there is a SDK or something that does it.

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

Calling a command-line interface using Process.Start does *not* count as an API in my book. It isn't robust, doesn't report errors properly, and is hard to include in any decent design.

I've used SharpZipLib and wasn't too impressed with the API, but mostly I don't to have different libraries for ZIP, RAR, CAB and so forth.

Xceed Real-Time Zip seems like a good match for most of my requirements. Has anyone used it? Any special pros or cons?

TommyCarlier
Trust me, I'm from the Internets

I haven't used Xceed Real-Time Zip for .NET (which is pretty new), but I've been using Xceed Zip for .NET for years now. Great library, awesome API.

evildictaitor
How could you use the adjective "indescribable" truthfully?

SharpZip is a really good ZIP library that also does GZIP, ZIP, BZIP, RAR, and can make as well as break archives in a fairly good way.

It's also in pure C# and opensource, so you can embed it for GPL licenced programs, or compile it and link it for proprietary software.

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

evildictaitor wrote:

SharpZip is a really good ZIP library that also does GZIP, ZIP, BZIP, RAR, and can make as well as break archives in a fairly good way.

It's also in pure C# and opensource, so you can embed it for GPL licenced programs, or compile it and link it for proprietary software.

I deliberately didn't list open-source and GPL in my list of requirements, since this is not for a GPL project and I would rather have a company backing the product with support rather than the ability to hack my own fixes.

I didn't know it did RAR as well, so that's good news on that front.

Thanks for the pointers, everyone.

JChung2006

.NET 2.0 supports GZip natively: System.IO.Compression in the System assembly.

.NET 3.0 supports ZIP natively: System.IO.Packaging in the WindowsCore assembly.

Igor Pavlov, author of 7-Zip and the LZMA SDK, will let you use his LZMA SDK in proprietary applications if you don't modify it. Modifications and customizations require a CPL, LGPL, or proprietary license.