Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

SUMMARY

A program uses operators to manipulate variables, constants, and literal values to produce new results. The Visual Basic operators fall into five categories: arithmetic, concatenation, comparison, logical, and bitwise. In most cases, using operators is straightforward and intuitive.

Operator precedence determines the order in which Visual Basic applies operators when evaluating an expression. In cases where an expression’s operator precedence is unclear, add parentheses to make the order obvious. Even if you don’t change the way that Visual Basic handles the statement, you can make the code more understandable and avoid possibly time-consuming bugs.

The String data type has its own special needs. String manipulation plays a big role in many applications, so Visual Basic provides a StringBuilder class for manipulating strings more efficiently. If your program only works with a few short strings, it probably doesn’t need to use a StringBuilder, and using the String data type will probably make your code easier to understand. However, if your application builds enormous strings or concatenates a huge number of strings, you may be able to save a noticeable amount of time by using the StringBuilder class.

The Date data type also behaves differently from other data types. The normal operators such as + and - have different meanings here from other data types. For example, a Date minus a Date gives a TimeSpan, not another Date. These operations generally make sense if you think ...