However, if you declare the string on the VB side, it is a SAFEARRAY, and you normally get a VARIANT containing a SAFEARRAY. Look in the MSDN for a bunch of macros to deal with SAFEARRAYS.

ADO.NET Data Services supports integer, double, decimal, string, boolean, and dateTime data types, which the following functions accept or return as noted. Queries use these functions in the same ...

regular expressions, dude. I'm not much in vb, but here's a simple javascript routine to strip the first string of HTML found.