The Microsoft Foundation Class Library provides the CFile class to handle normal file I/O operations. This chapter shows you how to open and close files and read and write arbitrary data to those files. You will also learn about file status operations. You may also be interested in reading section 10.2, “Serialization”, of this chapter for a description of how to use the object-based serialization features of the Microsoft Foundation Class Library as an alternative way of reading and writing data in files.