Zip now has the ability to read and write to zip files stored in streams in addition to actual files using the C1ZipFile.Open(Stream) method. This allows reading zip files embedded in application resources or stored in database fields instead of in actual files.

Easily obtain zip file information including a detailed list of the zip file's contents. You can also control file information by adding and retrieving comments and control path information for individual entries in the zip file, and getting and setting the global zip file comment.

With Zip's low memory footprint engine you can zip files or memory buffers into new or existing zip files, unzip files to disk or directly to memory, compress and decompress strings or buffers completely in memory, and add stream-based compression and decompression for maximum flexibility.

ZLIB is a general-purpose, lossless data-compression library with a portable, cross-platform data format. Unlike Unix compress and GIF image format LZW compression, the ZLIB compression method essentially never expands the data (LZW doubles or triples the file size in extreme cases) and has a memory footprint independent of input data.

Zip contains three main classes: C1ZipFile is a class that deals with zip files. It allows you to create, open, and modify zip files. C1ZipFile has a C1ZipFile.Entries property that represents a collection of entries in a zip file. C1ZStreamWriter is a stream object that takes regular data on input, compresses it, and writes it out to an underlying stream. You can compress data to files, memory, or any other type of stream. You can attach a BinaryWriter object to C1ZStreamWriter to write objects directly, without dealing with byte arrays.C1ZStreamReader is a stream object that takes a compressed stream as input and decompresses it as it reads data from the underlying compressed stream. You can attach a BinaryReader object to C1ZStreamReader to read objects directly, without dealing with byte arrays.