Ok, so first the proverbial <vent>Why the craptastic don't so many .Net controls take arrays for properties such as column names, indexed, and what other imaginitive thing that would and should take an array.</vent>

I feel better. Thanks! On a positive note, I dig Linq so thank you for this great piece of work, it makes a lot more sense to me than many other things I learn in .Net.

So here's what I'm trying to cook up because a) my boss needs this to work =) 2) it would be beneficial to anyone else who thinks this should be possible with minor effort.

 Presenting, our friend the checkboxlist

<asp:CheckBoxList ID="chkListTypes" DataSourceID="lnqDirectoryTypes" runat="server"
                DataTextField="Type" DataValueField="ID" RepeatLayout="Flow" />

My Linq source has 2 columns, ID and Types. When the user submits the form, the ID's are sent through this little snippet of fun:

Protected Sub chkListTypes_SelectedIndexChanged(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles chkListTypes.SelectedIndexChanged
            Dim li As ListItem
            Dim db As New DirectoryDataContext 'my project is ambiguosly named directory
            Dim settings As New TGIDirectorySetting

            'build string of type id's for storage
            Dim strListItemIDs As String = ""
            For Each li In chkListTypes.Items
                If li.Selected Then
                    strListItemIDs += li.Value & ","
                End If
            Next
            'Remove trailing comma
            If strListItemIDs.EndsWith(",") Then
                strListItemIDs = strListItemIDs.Substring(0, strListItemIDs.Length - 1)
            End If
            'now we know what they checked, let's throw it in the db
            db.UpdateTGIDirectorySettings("", ModuleId, strListItemIDs)

        End Sub

So as you see I store the ID's in a CSV string in a table containing application settings.

The goal is to use Linq to query the settings table CSV string, turn it into an array, and then use the values from the array to populate the checkboxlist.items(ID).Selected=True accordingly.

Here's where I got up to:

            Dim db As New DirectoryDataContext
            Dim Mytypes = From loadedTypes In db.TGIDirectorySettings Where loadedTypes.moduleID.Equals(ModuleId) Select loadedTypes.loadtype
            Dim items = Mytypes.ToString().Split(",")


            For i = 0 To items.Count
                For Each index In items
                    chkListTypes.Items(index).Selected = True
                Next
            Next

Which has a few problems...index must be a single integer, not an array. And that pretty much clues me that my thinking might not be the right way to go for making this happen. Any ideas/feedback are welcome.

"index" would actually be string as "items" would be a string array. Therefore, you'd need to do something like this: 

For Each item As String In items
	chkListTypes.Items.FindByValue(item).Selected = True
Next

Awesome, that's exactly what I needed. But items ends up having the value

"SELECT [t0].[loadtype] FROM [dbo].[TGIDirectorySettings] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[moduleID] = @p0 "

 Which of course I need the result set from my query and not the query itself. Why would that be the case?
 

Well I figured it out, here's the final code for anyone else who needs it

        Protected Sub chkListTypes_PreRender(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs) Handles chkListTypes.PreRender
            Dim db As New DirectoryDataContext
            Dim Mytypes = From loadedTypes In db.TGIDirectorySettings Where loadedTypes.moduleID.Equals(ModuleId) Select loadedTypes.loadtype
            Dim items = Mytypes.Single.Split(",")
            For i As Integer = Mytypes.Count To 0 Step -1
                For Each item As String In items
                    chkListTypes.Items.FindByValue(item).Selected = True
                Next
            Next i
        End Sub