Writing And Reading Simple Structures From Files Into An Array

I coded anything but I remember when using VB6 or Pascal/Delphi we used to define records/ structures with fixed length fields, then write those structures to a file knowing that they would always be the same length. You could then open a particular record within the file or simply find out how many records existed by reading the file length.From what I understand, it seems that such methods are depreciated in VB.NET and such structures are written as a stream.Does it now mean that we can define things like variable length strings and not need to worry about buffers or boundaries?Is it possible to read through such files and pick out individual records? Are there methods of determining how many records that exist in a file? What I'm looking to do is simply store multiple records of a structure in a file then retrieve them into an array so I can manipulate their order by sorting the array and search within the array. This is only a learning project so it is unlikely that the resultant array is going to be large, although if this is not generaly a good method of doing this then it might be interesting to fidn out what is. So far, I have read that they way to write a structure to a file is to "serialises" it and then write the bytes - is this correct?[code]