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

It marks the string as a verbatim string literal - anything in the string that would normally be interpreted as an escape sequence is ignored.

So "C:\\Users\\Rich" is the same as @"C:\Users\Rich"

There is one exception: an escape sequence is needed for the double quote. To escape a double quote, you need to put two double quotes in a row. For instance, @"""" evaluates to ".

It's a verbatim string literal. It means that escaping isn't applied. For instance:

string verbatim = @"foo\bar";
string regular = "foo\\bar";

Here verbatim and regular have the same contents.

It also allows multi-line contents - which can be very handy for SQL:

string select = @"
SELECT Foo
FROM Bar
WHERE Name='Baz'";

The one bit of escaping which is necessary for verbatim string literals is to get a double quote (") which you do by doubling it:

string verbatim = @"He said, ""Would you like some coffee?"" and left.";
string regular = "He said, \"Would you like some coffee?\" and left.";

An '@' has another meaning as well: putting it in front of a variable declaration allows you to use reserved keywords as variable names.

For example:

string @class = "something";
int @object = 1;

I've only found one or two legitimate uses for this. Mainly in ASP.NET MVC when you want to do something like this:

<%= Html.ActionLink("Text", "Action", "Controller", null, new { @class = "some_css_class" })%>

Which would produce an HTML link like:

<a href="/Controller/Action" class="some_css_class">Text</a>

Otherwise you would have to use 'Class', which isn't a reserved keyword but the uppercase 'C' does not follow HTML standards and just doesn't look right.

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.)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa691090.aspx

C# supports two forms of string literals: regular string literals and verbatim string literals.

A regular string literal consists of zero or more characters enclosed in double quotes, as in "hello", and may include both simple escape sequences (such as \t for the tab character) and hexadecimal and Unicode escape sequences.

A verbatim string literal consists of an @ character followed by a double-quote character, zero or more characters, and a closing double-quote character. A simple example is @"hello". In a verbatim string literal, the characters between the delimiters are interpreted verbatim, the only exception being a quote-escape-sequence. In particular, simple escape sequences and hexadecimal and Unicode escape sequences are not processed in verbatim string literals. A verbatim string literal may span multiple lines.

This is a verbatim string, and changes the escaping rules - the only character that is now escaped is ", escaped to "". This is especially useful for file paths and regex:

var path = @"c:\some\location";
var tsql = @"SELECT *
            FROM FOO
            WHERE Bar = 1";
var escaped = @"a "" b";

etc

Copied from MSDN:

At compile time, verbatim strings are converted to ordinary strings with all the same escape sequences. Therefore, if you view a verbatim string in the debugger watch window, you will see the escape characters that were added by the compiler, not the verbatim version from your source code. For example, the verbatim string @"C:\files.txt" will appear in the watch window as "C:\\files.txt".

Putting a @ in front of a string enables you to use special characters such as a backslash or double-quotes without having to use special codes or escape characters.

So you can write:

string path = @"C:\My path\";

instead of:

string path = "C:\\My path\\";

The explanation is simple. To represent the string "string\", the compiler needs "string\\" because \ is an escape character. If you use @"string\" instead, you can forget about \\.