There are two ways of working with files in Visual Basic.

• The new way – using the FileSystemObject.
• The old way – using the old Visual Basic file manipulation functions.

Personally I was unable to use the FileSystemObject the way that Visual Basic help says, so, for now we will not use the FileSystemObject. (We will review it in the Tips&Trick Chapter)

Depending on the data type you need you may choose three types of file acces that are available in Visual Basic:

• Sequential – Used for Reading/Writing text in continous blocks
• Random – Used for reading and writing text or binary files structured as fixed-length records.
• Binary – Used for reading and writing arbitrarily structured files.