What is the difference between And and AndAlso in VB.NET?

The And operator will check all conditions in the statement before continuing, whereas the Andalso operator will stop if it knows the condition is false. For example:

if x = 5 And y = 7

Checks if x is equal to 5, and if y is equal to 7, then continues if both are true.

if x = 5 AndAlso y = 7

Checks if x is equal to 5. If it's not, it doesn't check if y is 7, because it knows that the condition is false already. (This is called short-circuiting.)

Generally people use the short-circuiting method if there's a reason to explicitly not check the second part if the first part is not true, such as if it would throw an exception if checked. For example:

If Not Object Is Nothing AndAlso Object.Load()

If that used And instead of AndAlso, it would still try to Object.Load() even if it were nothing, which would throw an exception.

The And operator evaluates both sides, where AndAlso evaluates the right side if and only if the left side is true.

An example:

If mystring IsNot Nothing And mystring.Contains("Foo") Then
  ' bla bla
End If

The above throws an exception if mystring = Nothing

If mystring IsNot Nothing AndAlso mystring.Contains("Foo") Then
  ' bla bla
End If

This one does not throw an exception.

So if you come from the C# world, you should use AndAlso like you would use &&.

More info here: http://www.panopticoncentral.net/2003/08/18/the-ballad-of-andalso-and-orelse/