Read original post at Martin Suchan's Blog
Working with files is one of the most common tasks when developing any Windows Phone or Windows apps. In this mini-series of articles I'll show you available APIs in all Windows Phone and Windows versions, caveats when doing task such as checking if specific file exists, getting target file, reading writing data from/to files and also how to effectively extract data from ZIP files, and more.
In the first part of this series I'll discuss available File IO APIs in Windows Phone 8, 8.1 Silverlight, 8.1 XAML, Windows 8 and 8.1 platforms and benchmark all available methods for testing, if target file in Local Folder exists, or not. To my great surprise, the performance of methods in StorageFolder API is dramatically different across different platforms and it's not a good idea to use single approach everywhere.