What you show is a really bad way, because you may easily make a mistake with a string. Therefore, it's much better to set selected index (exact answer depends on exact type of
ComboBox
; there are different types under this name).
But really robust and reliable approach is to put items of some semantic data type in the list. I explain it in my past answers collected here:
combobox.selectedvalue shows {} in winform[
^].
—SA