VB.NET Syntax and Variables

VB.NET syntax is line-oriented and case-insensitive rather than brace-delimited: each statement typically ends at the newline rather than a semicolon, keywords like If, Then, and End If read close to plain English, and identifiers like totalAmount and TotalAmount refer to the exact same variable because the compiler ignores case entirely.

Variables are declared with the Dim keyword followed by the name, the As keyword, and the data type, such as Dim age As Integer = 25; VB.NET also supports type inference with Dim count = 10 when Option Infer is on (the default in most templates), letting the compiler deduce the type from the initializer without you writing As Integer explicitly.

By convention VB.NET uses PascalCase for public members like class names and public properties (CustomerName) and camelCase for local variables and private fields (customerName), and a variable's scope is determined by where it's declared — a Dim inside a Sub is local to that procedure, while a Dim at the class level (often combined with Private) is accessible to every method in that class.

Comments in VB.NET start with a single apostrophe ' and run to the end of the line — there is no multi-line comment block syntax as in C#'s /* */ — and because statements traditionally end at the newline, a long statement can be split across multiple lines using the underscore _ line-continuation character, though most modern VB.NET code avoids this by simply letting method chains or parameter lists wrap naturally after commas.