Chapter 10. Data Binding

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

Thomas Jefferson

Web applications are, for the most part, just data-driven applications. For this reason, the ability to bind HTML elements such as drop-down lists or tables to structured data is a key feature for any Web development platform. Data binding is the process that retrieves data from a given source and associates it with properties on UI elements. In ASP.NET, a valid target for a data binding operation is a server control, also known as a data-bound control.

Data-bound server controls are not another family of controls; they’re simply server controls that feature a few well-known data-related properties and feed them using ...

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