VS 2010 First Shot At A Dictionary

I am a relatively new coder and have been learning quite a bit over the past year. I have a fully functional application that works fantastic, and I am now in the process of learning better coding habits.The original code is set up like this...I have a combobox where I place the collection items in manually.On the selectedIndexChanged event handler I used a case statement that looks something like this: [code]Ok, so as you can probably tell, the file name and the dropdown option have the same name, and when it's selected it loads the contents of the resource file into the listbox. It works great...but I was told that since the case statement is ever growing, I should use a dictionary instead. So my goal was to simplify my coding efforts (when I add a new item I have to code in three different areas...with the dictionary, I only have to add the new item and everything else will take care of itself).

So I created the dictionary in a sub, an used a for each loop to dynamically load the combobox with the key values.My values in the dictionary are set up as "My.Resources.filename" where filename matches the key value.I want to be able to call the value based on the selected key. After 5 days of researching I think the best option is the TryGetValue method, but I cannot get it to work...I have used so many different examples, that I actually had to get rid of them all and don't have any current code to post.

1) If I redeclare the dictionary, won't it be empty?

2) How do I "extract the value based on the selected key an set it to a variable (i.e. myvariable = My.Resources.selectedkeysvalue)