Control of ports

I have recently changed from using Borland C++ to Visual C++ 6.0 and found that the control of external devices via the ports have changed, is there a simple solution to use the ports again (eg outportb could be used in Borland)? I am mainly trying to get started in the right direction so I can have a GUI and use the ports at the same time. Thanks for any assistance.

For all the common stuff (say serial port), you use the appropriate win32 API.