Update Command Not Writing To Db

I thought this would work.  I use this code to update another table in another page. In this page, after someone has cast their vote for an article, the article db is updated for the current rating.  It reads all the votes so far and takes and average and is supposed to write this number to the article database. There are 2 columns. ArticleRating is a decimal and is the average and ArticleReaders is the total number of votes. 

The response.write in lines 3 and 4 are the correct numbers appearing in my upper left corner of the page. They are not getting written to the db.  Can someone help me understand why this is the case? 1
2 Public Function UpdateRating(ByVal ArticleID As Integer, ByVal ArticleRating As Decimal, ByVal Votes As Integer) As Boolean
3 Response.Write("Values: " & ArticleRating)
4 Response.Write("Votes: " & Votes)
5
6 Dim con As New SqlConnection(DataFuncs.GetConnectionString)
7 Const sSQL As String = "UPDATE tblArticle SET ArticleRating = @ArticleRating, ArticleReaders=@Votes WHERE ArticleID = @ArticleID"
8 Dim xSqlCommand As SqlCommand = New SqlCommand(sSQL, con)
9 Try
10 xSqlCommand.Parameters.Add("@Rating", Data.SqlDbType.Decimal)
11 xSqlCommand.Parameters("@Rating").Value = Rating
12 xSqlCommand.Parameters.Add("@Article", Data.SqlDbType.Decimal)
13 xSqlCommand.Parameters("@ArticleID").Value = ArticleID
14 con.Open()
15 xSqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery()
16 con.Close()
17 Return True
18 Catch ex As Exception
19 Return False
20 Throw ex
21 Finally
22 xSqlCommand.Dispose()
23 con.Dispose()
24 End Try
25 End Function