Calling My Connection From Pages

I have been looking everywhere and cant seem to find out how to do this using 2.0

I would like to have my connection strign in my web.config file being decralred publicly in my pages so that I dont have to repeat lines of code throughout pages.

In my web.config I have this.
<connectionStrings>
  <add name="myconn" connectionString="Data Source=.SQLEXPRESS;AttachDbFilename=|DataDirectory|ASPNETDB.MDF;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True"
   providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
</connectionStrings>


then in my pages I have

Imports System.Data
Imports System.Data.SqlClient

Public sqlconnection As New SqlConnection(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("myconn"))
Public sqlcommand As New SqlCommand
Public sqldataAdapter As New SqlDataAdapter
Public sSQL as String

Function getdata()
sSQL = "INSERT INTO tbl_Idea (Status) value (@Status)
Dim dbcommand As New System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand(sSQL, sqlconnection)

Dim statusparam As New SqlParameter("@Status", SqlDbType.NVarChar)
statusparam.Value = "PENDING"
dbcommand.Parameters.Add(statusparam)

sqlconnection.Open()
dbcommand.ExecuteNonQuery()
sqlconnection.Close()

for some reason this code does not seem to work.  It keeps telling me The ConnectionString Property has not been initialized.

I do the same thing in my asp.net 1.1 pages using vs 2003.  Can some one help or atleast point in the right direction.

thanks