The Way Things Were

File handling before Visual Basic 6 had not changed significantly since Visual Basic 1 came onto the stage. In fact, it had not changed significantly since Kemeny and Kurtz first defined BASIC back at Dartmouth College in 1964. You used the Open statement to open or create a file, the Print and Put statements to write to the file, and the Read and Get statements to retrieve information. It all worked (most of the time), but it was somewhat clunky. You had to associate a file with a handle (a number from 1-16), and then use that handle to print #1 to the file. There was no easy way to get directory information, or even file information (beyond size).

In Visual Basic 6.0, a library called the File System Object greatly simplified file manipulation and access. With Visual Basic .NET, most of the features of the File System Object are included but through an entirely new set of classes built into the .NET Framework.