String value from column in grid

I'm tring to do something that I thought would be fairly simple until ....... oops I remembered I was trying to do it in .NET. I have a grid (Ultragrid from Infragistics) I have te grid working just fine. When the user enters a new row I would like to place the data entered in a particular field into a string. I'm very new to .NET and I seem to be more and more clueless as each day passes. Here is the code I have so far:

Private Function ValidLastName(ByVal e As Infragistics.Win.UltraWinGrid.BeforeCellUpdateEventArgs) As Boolean
If e.NewValue = "" Then
MessageBox.Show("You must enter a last name before continuing")
e.Cancel = True
Return False
Else
Return True
strLast = e.NewValue(ToString)
End If
End Function

When I debug to check the values & hover over e.NewValue(ToString) it shows: e.NewValue = "Name" {String}
I just want the strLast to be able to be populated with the value in the grid.

I have dim'ed strLast at the beginning of the class. I'm missing something & can't figure out what I'm doing. Any help please?

Thanks,
Corinne

Dont know the particular control you refer to but if it is derived from the basic datagrid class, in he datagrid class, I would use as follows:

dim currow as integer.
dim thisname as string
currow = datagrid1.currentrowindex
thisname = DataGrid1.Item(currow, 0)
if trim(thisname).length = 0 then
your error code

Thanks for your suggestion, I'll try that.

Corinne