Understanding Assemblies

Chapter 12. File Operations

In the past, Visual Basic included some native functions for working with files and directories. Their functions were often cumbersome to use, relatively slow to execute, and limited in functionality. In order to accomplish quick and robust file manipulation, you often had to resort to the Windows API (which presented its own challenges and problems). With the release of Visual Basic .NET, file manipulation just got a whole lot easier. The Microsoft .NET Framework includes a number of classes that make working with the underlying file system almost trivial. In this chapter, I'll cover the basics of the file-related classes and provide best practices for manipulating files on a user's computer.