Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Auto-Generating Bound Windows Forms Controls

Although there are various ways to approach and implement data-bound controls with Visual Studio, they all involve the same basic two steps:

1. Establish a data source.

2. Map the data-source members to controls or control properties.

From there, the Visual Studio Form Designers are capable of generating the correct controls and placing them on the form. All the data-binding code is handled for you; all you need to worry about is the layout, positioning, and UI aspects of the controls.

As you might imagine, your form might have controls that use simple data binding or complex data binding or a mix of both. Now you’re ready to look at the steps involved with creating a series of controls that leverage ...