How to select/get drop down option in Selenium 2

I am converting my selenium 1 code to selenium 2 and can't find any easy way to select a label in a drop down menu or get the selected value of a drop down. Do you know how to do that in Selenium 2?

Here are two statements that work in Selenium 1 but not in 2:

browser.select("//path_to_drop_down", "Value1");
browser.getSelectedValue("//path_to_drop_down");

Take a look at the section about filling in forms using webdriver in the selenium documentation and the javadoc for the Select class.

To select an option based on the label:

Select select = new Select(driver.findElement(By.xpath("//path_to_drop_down")));
select.deselectAll();
select.selectByVisibleText("Value1");

To get the first selected value:

WebElement option = select.getFirstSelectedOption()

driver.findElement(By.id("id_dropdown_menu")).click();
driver.findElement(By.xpath("xpath_from_seleniumIDE")).click();

in ruby for constantly using, add follow:

module Selenium
  module WebDriver
    class Element
      def select(value)
        self.find_elements(:tag_name => "option").find do |option|
          if option.text == value
            option.click
              return
           end
       end
    end
  end
end

and you will be able to select value:

browser.find_element(:xpath, ".//xpath").select("Value")