Lack of block comments in VB .NET?

vb.net comments block-comments
froadie picture froadie · Feb 4, 2010 · Viewed 9.8k times · Source

Just a question of interest: Does anyone know why there's no block comment capability in VB .NET? (Unless there really is - but I've never yet come across it.)

Answer

Hans Passant picture Hans Passant · Feb 4, 2010

It is a side-effect of the Visual Basic syntax, a new-line terminates a statement. That makes a multi-line comment pretty incompatible with the basic way the compiler parses the language. Not an issue in the curly brace languages, new-lines are just white space.

It has never been a real problem, Visual Basic has had strong IDE support for a very long time. Commenting out multiple lines is an IDE feature, Edit + Advanced + Comment Selection.

Related questions

What is a NullReferenceException, and how do I fix it?

I have some code and when it executes, it throws a NullReferenceException, saying: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. What does this mean, and what can I do to fix this error?

Read More
Converting string to byte array in C#

I'm converting something from VB into C#. Having a problem with the syntax of this statement: if ((searchResult.Properties["user"].Count > 0)) { profile.User = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(searchResult.Properties["user"][0]); } I then see the following errors: Argument 1: cannot …

Read More
Why is Dictionary preferred over Hashtable in C#?

In most programming languages, dictionaries are preferred over hashtables. What are the reasons behind that?

Read More