Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

TYPOGRAPHIC CODE ELEMENTS

A few typographic code elements can make a program’s structure a bit easier to understand. They do not execute programming commands themselves, but they are an important part of how you can structure your code. These elements include comments, line continuation and joining characters, and line labels.

Comments

Comments can help other developers (or you at a later date) understand the program’s purpose, structure, and method. You start a comment by typing a single quotation mark (') that is not inside a quoted string. All of the characters starting at the quote and continuing until the end of the line are part of the comment and are ignored by Visual Basic.

If a line with a comment ends with a line continuation character (described shortly), Visual Basic ignores that character. That means the line is not continued onto the next line, so the comment ends with the current line. In other words, you cannot use line continuation characters to make a multi-line comment.

To quickly comment or uncomment a large block of code, click and drag to select the code using the mouse and then open the Edit menu’s Advanced submenu. Select the Comment Selection command to comment out the selection or select Uncomment Selection to remove the comment characters from the front of the selection. Those commands are also available more conveniently as buttons in the Standard toolbar. Use the View menu’s Toolbars submenu to show or hide this toolbar.

Another way to quickly remove ...