Thanks Lowell, it does help. I have one more question. My .net is non-existent and so please forgive me if this is a dumb question.

I have in my code:

Imports System.Data

Imports System.Data.SqlClient

and I'm a lot further on now thanks to your post. However, I'm getting:

Import of type 'System.ComponentModel.Component' from assembly or module 'System' failed.

This is occurring on the following line:

Dim cmd As New SqlCommand

I thought that SqlCommand would come in Data.SqlClient, but it appears not. I get a similar error on the DataReader too. I tried adding ComponentModel in my imports, but clearly it's not as simple as that.

What else do I need to add to the imports?