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## Current version

Visual Basic 15.8 / Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.8
For new features, see [Visual Basic 15.8](#visual-basic-158)
Visual Basic 16.0 / Visual Studio 2019 Version 16.0
For new features, see [Visual Basic 16.0](#visual-basic-160)

## Previous versions

Visual Basic 15.8 / Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.8
For new features, see [Visual Basic 15.8](#visual-basic-158)

Visual Basic 15.5 / Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.5
For new features, see [Visual Basic 15.5](#visual-basic-155)

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Visual Basic / Visual Studio .NET 2002
The first release of Visual Basic .NET

## Visual Basic 16.0
Visual Basic 16.0 focuses on supplying more of the features of the Visual Basic Runtime (microsoft.visualbasic.dll) to .NET Core and is the first version of Visual Basic focused on .NET Core. Many portions of the Visual Basic Runtime depend on WinForms and these will be added in a later version of Visual Basic.

**Comments allowed in more places within statements**
In Visual Basic 15.8 and earlier versions, comments are only allowed on blank lines, at the end of a statement, or in specific places within a statement where an implicit line continuation is allowed. Starting with Visual Basic 16.0, comments are also allowed after explicit line continuations and within a statement on a line beginning with a space followed by an underscore.

```vb
Public Sub Main()
cmd.CommandText = ' Comment is allowed here without _
"SELECT * FROM Titles JOIN Publishers " _ ' This is a comment
& "ON Publishers.PubId = Titles.PubID " _
_ ' This is a comment on a line without code
& "WHERE Publishers.State = 'CA'"
End Sub
```

## Visual Basic 15.8

**Optimized floating-point to integer conversion**
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### To break a single statement into multiple lines

- Use the line-continuation character, which is an underscore (`_`), at the point at which you want the line to break. The underscore must be immediately preceded by a space and immediately followed by a line terminator (carriage return).
- Use the line-continuation character, which is an underscore (`_`), at the point at which you want the line to break. The underscore must be immediately preceded by a space and immediately followed by a line terminator (carriage return) or (starting with version 16.0) a comment followed by a carriage return.

> [!NOTE]
> In some cases, if you omit the line-continuation character, the Visual Basic compiler will implicitly continue the statement on the next line of code. For a list of syntax elements for which you can omit the line-continuation character, see "Implicit Line Continuation" in [Statements](../../../visual-basic/programming-guide/language-features/statements.md).
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