Trailing Ampersand in VB.NET hexadecimal?

This should be an easy one for folks. Google's got nothing except content farms linking t开发者_如何转开发o one blurb, and that's written in broken English. So let's get this cleared up here where it'll be entombed for all time.

What's the trailing ampersand on VB hexadecimal numbers for? I've read it forces conversion to an Int32 on the chance VB wants to try and store as an Int16. That makes sense to me. But the part I didn't get from the blurb was to always use the trailing ampersand for bitmasks, flags, enums, etc. Apparantly, it has something to do with overriding VB's fetish for using signed numbers for things internally, which can lead to weird results in comparisons.

So to get easy points, what are the rules for VB.Net hexadecimal numbers, with and without the trailing ampersand? Please include the specific usage in the case of bitmasks/flags and such, and how one would also use it to force signed vs. unsigned.

No C# please :)

Vb.net will regard "&h"-notation hex constants in the range from 0x80000000-0xFFFFFFFF as negative numbers unless the type is explicitly specified as UInt32, Int64, or UInt64. Such behavior might be understandable if the numbers were written with precisely eight digits following the "&", but for some reason I cannot fathom, vb.net will behave that way even if the numbers are written with leading zeroes. In present versions of VB, one may force the number to be evaluated correctly by using a suffix of "&" suffix (Int64), "L" (Int64), "UL" (UInt64), or "UI" (UInt32). In earlier versions of VB, the "problem range" was 0x8000-0xFFFF, and the only way to force numbers in that range to be evaluated correctly (as a 32-bit integer, which was then called a "Long") was a trailing ampersand.

Visual Basic has the concept of Type Characters. These can be used to modify variable declarations and literals, although I'd not recommend using them in variable declarations - most developers are more familiar these days with As. E.g. the following declarations are equivalent:

Dim X&
Dim X As Long

But personally, I find the second more readable. If I saw the first, I'd actually have to go visit the link above, or use Intellisense, to work out what the variable is (not good if looking at the code on paper).