It's an old problem. Let's say you want to use a ComboBox in your WinForm application and you want to have a display and a value that are separate. If you are using DataBind that's a breeze, just specify the two columns separately. But ComboBox.Items.Add() only takes an object. So, if you want to add a string to display and use that string as the value, you're all set. If you want something more then you need to create a ComboBox item object. Which isn't supplied by default. So you create one. The only good news for 2008 is that it cuts the number of lines by 2/3 because of the automagic properties syntax. Here's the class you'll need:

/// <summary>
/// cbItem is a handy class for adding items to
/// a ComboBox when you don't want to databind.
/// </summary>
public class cbItem
{
  /// <summary>
  /// The name of the object
  /// </summary>
  public string Name { get; set; }

  /// <summary>
  /// The value of the object
  /// </summary>
  public string Value { get; set; }

  /// <summary>
  /// Create a new Combo Box object
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name="oName">Name of the object, will display in the ComboBox</param>
  /// <param name="oValue">Value of the object.</param>
  public cbItem(string oName, string oValue)
  {
   Name = oName;
   Value = oValue;
  }

  public override string ToString()
  {
   return Name;
  }
}

To use this to populate a ComboBox you can use something like this:

SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT ClientID, ClientName FROM clients ORDER BY ClientName",
new SqlConnection(WMTClientMigration.Properties.Settings.Default.WMTDatabase));
   cmd.Connection.Open();
   SqlDataReader rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader();
   while (rdr.Read())    {    cbClients.Items.Add(new cbItem(rdr[1].ToString(), rdr[0].ToString()));   }

And, finally, you can access the data easily:

private void cbClients_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
  {
   Console.WriteLine(cbClients.SelectedItem.ToString());
   Console.WriteLine(((cbItem)cbClients.SelectedItem).Value);
  }

Still, it would be a lot easier if this was built into a ComboBoxItem class by MSFT.