How to Open a File in VBNet

VB.NET has internal libraries that help you open files without programming low-level code that opens and parses the data. The VB.NET IO library contains the class "StreamReader" to open a file. You can read the content of the file into a VB.NET variable and display it to the user using a text box or other VB.NET data control.

Instructions

1. • 1
     Open the VB.NET Visual Studio software program on your desktop and open the project you want to edit. Open the source code file you want to use to open the file.
   • 2
     Add the IO libraries to your source code file. At the top of the file is a list of libraries imported into the project. Copy and paste the following code to the top of the file:

     Imports System.IO
   • 3
     Create a variable that points to the file and opens it. The following code opens the file and assigns the variable "myfile" to the file content:

     Dim myfile As New StreamReader("c:\readfile.txt")

     Replace the "readfile.txt" with the path and name of your own file.
   • 4
     Display the content to the user. For instance, the following code shows the file's content to a text box named "displaycontent":

     displaycontent.Text = myfile.ReadToEnd