I've written a number of 24 Hours books for Sams (including Teach Yourself Visual Basic 2005 in 24 Hours and Teach Yourself C# 2005 in 24 Hours), and I agree that none of these titles will make you an expert in 24 hours - or even get you close. The goal of these books is to provide adequate, useful, and hopefully entertaining instruction for you to learn the basics of a language and its tools and allow you to begin creating your own applications using the language; yu won't know all the answers as you stumble along with your own applications, but hopefully you will have learned enough of the basics to understand what's going on and how to find help or experiment to solve your own problems. These books serve a purpose, but I don't think anyone (publishers, authors, or readers) really believe that the books will make you an expert in the stated amount of time.

james commercial developer, author, speaker, dude. www.jamesfoxall.com

The one you defined in your class will fire before the event on the form.

james commercial developer, author, speaker, dude. www.jamesfoxall.com

You're welcome. :)

james commercial developer, author, speaker, dude. www.jamesfoxall.com

Here's what appears to have happened: You inherited a combo box - this is good. However, now your entire control is the combo box; you don't need to create another. You have also declared a combo box variable, but there is no need to do this and it will never fire because you haven't added the combo box to the Controls collection and therefor it isn't visible in the UI. Try this: 1. Take out the Public Sub and Public WithEvents statements (and the End Sub, of course). 2. In the object drop down in the upper-left corner of the code window, select (Class 1 Events). 3. In the event drop down list in the upper-right corner, select GotFocus. You will now have a GotFocus event that will fire appropriately.

james commercial developer, author, speaker, dude. www.jamesfoxall.com

I agree, but I wanted to throw it out there. It's certainly worth spending a half hour with google over. :)

james commercial developer, author, speaker, dude. www.jamesfoxall.com

Something else to consider: if you're only using a single combo box for your control, you should look into inheriting the Windows.Forms.ComboBox. This will solve your display issues. You can get started very easily by pasting this class declaration into a new Class file, overwriting the default text: Public Class MyCustomCombo Inherits System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox End Class Mind you, programming an inherited control can be tricky, but the rewards are worth it.

james commercial developer, author, speaker, dude. www.jamesfoxall.com

Can you post your TextChanged event code? It might have to do with the way you are handling it (overloads, shadows, etc.)

james commercial developer, author, speaker, dude. www.jamesfoxall.com

Stored procedures are often the best way to go, but you will be limited in how you can create your SQL statements. A stored procedure has to be able to be compiled when saved, which means the compiler needs to know the fields to retrieve/update and the criteria to use when exucuting the procedure. With highly dynamic SQL, this is often not an option. In short, use a stored procedure if possible. Another option is to create SQL views and call those to retrieve data. If you're going to process the views though (i.e. retrieve a subset of data from a view), wrap that code in a stored procedure if possible.

james commercial developer, author, speaker, dude. www.jamesfoxall.com