.net - What's the @ in front of a string in C#?

Since you explicitly asked for VB as well, let me just add that this verbatim string syntax doesn't exist in VB, only in C#. Rather, all strings are verbatim in VB (except for the fact that they cannot contain line breaks, unlike C# verbatim strings):

Dim path = "C:\My\Path"
Dim message = "She said, ""Hello, beautiful world."""

Escape sequences don't exist in VB (except for the doubling of the quote character, like in C# verbatim strings) which makes a few things more complicated. For example, to write the following code in VB you need to use concatenation (or any of the other ways to construct a string)

string x = "Foo\nbar";

In VB this would be written as follows:

Dim x = "Foo" & Environment.NewLine & "bar"

(& is the VB string concatenation operator. + could equally be used.)