Soliciting opinions. I'm an ASP.NET dev, and I've got the opportunity to work on a project that will be in ASP.NET MVC, which I know little about. Am I right in thinking that it's a pared-down version of ASP.NET that enforces a design template and offers lots of other syntactic sugar to cover up the inner workings of standard ASP.NET, or is there more to it? I've previously done some Silverlight, but wouldn't choose to do another due to its likely demise. There's no connection between ASP.NET MVC and WPF, right? Thoughts on the future of ASP.NET MVC?

You can at least eliminate the nested loop with a SELECT:

dim drRows() as DataRow = ds.Tables("R").Select("KeyField = '" & rwH.Item("KeyField").ToString & "'")
If drRows.Length > 0 Then
'do your thing
End If

The AutoComplete functionality Jorgen links you to is nice. But you might be asking for a simple way to filter your list items (which could be used in conjunction with AutoComplete). Have a look at the BindingSource class and its Filter property. Something like this:

Dim bs As New BindingSource
bs.DataSource = dtTable
Me.ComboBox1.DataSource = bs
Me.ComboBox1.DisplayMember = "DISPLAY_COLUMN"

Private Sub ComboBox1\_KeyPress(sender As Object, e As System.Windows.Forms.KeyPressEventArgs) Handles ComboBox1.KeyPress
    bs.Filter = "DISPLAY\_COLUMN LIKE '" & e.KeyChar & "%'"
End Sub

Michael Kay rocks (check out his books, if you're doing anything with XSLT): http://www.stylusstudio.com/xsllist/200403/post30310.html And attributes don't inherit the namespaces of their containing element by default. They only have namespaces if they have their own namespace prefix (which I don't think I've ever seen in practice). So if you had this XML:

and you wanted to find out what was in the box, you'd add foo and its URI to your namespace manager and get /demo/foo:box/@contents. Only with this XML:

would you need to specify the attribute's namespace: /demo/foo:box/@foo:contents.

Is your issue maybe in using the namespace in the xpath? In your original XML snippet, for example, if you wanted the "box" element in the foo namespace, you'd select foo:box. You do have to add the "foo" namespace to your manager to use it, though:

mgr.AddNamespace("foo","the URI for foo")

Just declaring a namespacemanager does not automatically load all the namespaces. When it's a default namespace (no prefix), the trick I've used in the past is to add a new namespace that has the same URI:

mgr.AddNamespace("foo2","the URI for foo")

This allows me to query for foo2:box. Or maybe you're just wondering why you can't query using xmlns as an attribute? I don't know the technical answer except that it's special somehow, not available as a standard attribute. You can still access it in xpath/xslt if you need to--check out the namespace-uri method, for example.

Kinda sounds like you're putting the cart before the horse. You're trying to walk the document to select the namespaces, but in order to walk the tree with xpaths, you really need the namespaces first. Do you not know the structure of your XML? You're really supposed to know your namespaces first, and just use them. You can, I think, walk the tree through the object model and pull out the namespace prefixes and URIs--using some combination of the NamespaceURI property, and the GetNamespaceOfPrefix and/or GetPrefixOfNamespace methods. There's probably a much more efficient way, though--maybe the XMLReader? Quick search .. try this: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GetNamespacesFromAnXMLDocumentWithXPathDocumentAndLINQToXML.aspx[^]

you're over-thinking it:

element[@ID >= '44' and @ID <= '50']