Prevent Visual Studio 2015 from removing line continuation characters (_) in VB.NET files

Question

I\'m opening some old VB.NET projects in Visual Studio 2015 and when I edit the code, VS changes the syntax:

It removes \"_\" in concatenations:

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Answer 1

Just CTRL-Z to undo the removal of the underscores right after Visual Studio (2015-19) "fixes" it for you. This leaves the "Pretty Listing" feature turned on but restores the missing underscores. Thanks David Carta for the answer left as a comment.