It seems like just yesterday that I was writing my post about the new features in Visual Basic 9. Alas, one of my favorite features of VB9 is extension methods, but I have not been able to use them so much in my day job.
With the release of Visual Studio 2010, Visual Basic 10 will also receive some enhancements. The VB Team announced that VB10's new Implicit Line Continuation will mean that most line continuation characters that were required in the past will become optional. Because VB the carriage return is used as both a line termination character for the Visual Basic compiler and as a line termination character in the code files, it meant that we were not free to organize our code to help make it more readable. Underscores were required to inform the compiler that the current line of code continues on the next line of text. C# handles line continuation without any trouble because it uses a line termination character (the semicolon) that doesn't get confused with the line termination character used to organize code visually (the carriage return).
This is not among the biggest features in VB10. By itself, I don't think this is going to improve readability all that much (as others have said) because the underscores just don't get in the way of reading the code. It will not save VB developers much time either. Underscores will still be necessary in a few circumstances, as described here, but we should see their use go down dramatically.
Maybe getting rid of the underscores will help with readability if it encourages developers to add artificial line breaks where they are helpful for improving readability. We've all seen the ungainly parameter list in a method declaration or a LINQ query that should have been put on 6 lines instead of 2. Not requiring underscores for line continuation might help some developers who eschewed the use of line continuation underscores.
It might also give C# guys one less reason to make fun of VB;
