John,

>not with "option strict on" which is the way I want to work, i.e. pre binding (like you c#) programmer.

OK, I don't know all the VB vagaries. In any case, you can try the suggestion I posted earlier about creating static (shared in VB) overloaded methods to automatically return non-null values. That way, even though you have to jump through a few coding hoops, at least you'll only have to do it once. <s>

~~Bonnie


>
>I started off as a C programmer 15 years ago, moved to FoxPro (VFP) about 5 years ago which is a very flexible language but does not require you to define anything if you so wish, and even if you do define variables they are all of variant type, and now want to move to VB.net and c# but want to learn best practice.