Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 3.5

The GridView Control

The GridView is the successor to the ASP.NET 1.x DataGrid control. It provides the same base set of capabilities, plus a long list of extensions and improvements. As mentioned, the DataGrid—which is still fully supported in ASP.NET 2.0—is an extremely powerful and versatile control. However, it has one big drawback: it requires you to write a lot of custom code, even to handle relatively simple and common operations such as paging, sorting, editing, or deleting data. The GridView control was designed to work around this limitation and make two-way data binding happen with as little code as possible. The control is tightly coupled to the family of new data source controls, and it can handle direct data source updates as long ...