Passing a dropdown value to a function. aka List to String

Hi;
I have a request from a project manager to pass a comma delimited group of strings as one long string to a SQL sproc.
The reason being having the one long string will facilitate the WHERE clause in a Sproc.
  I am building my string from a dropdown collection.
I start reading my dropdown at the second position because I have a dummy value in position zero.
The following is code that I tried but still doesn't work.
I think that I am pretty close codewise :
Dim x As Integer Dim holdCount As Integer = DropDownList2.Items.Count If (holdCount - 1) > 1 Then ' Dim holdBranches(holdCount - 1) As String Dim holdBranches As StringBuilder = New StringBuilder("", 1000) For x = 1 To holdCount holdBranches.Append(DropDownList2.Items.Item(x).Text) holdBranches.Append(",") ...