ADO.NET Programming in Visual Basic™ .NET

The DataGrid

We have left the DataGrid control as a separate topic because the control is quite complex. It is the most robust grid control ever provided out-of-the-box from Microsoft. It is probably as robust as some of the third-party grid controls of only a couple of revisions back. The DataGrid has no unbound mode. It must be bound to a DataSource. But before you get excited, think for a minute. Since we can now create DataSets on the fly and use them in place of obsolete structures like arrays, we really can use the grid unbound —to a database that is. All we have to do is create a DataTable or a DataSet, populate it with whatever way we want, and bind it to our grid. This is the same effect as an unbound grid control in previous versions ...