Sams Teach Yourself ADO.NET in 24 Hours

Some General Notes About List Controls

List controls are standard Web controls that serve a single purpose: to display collections of data, such as the results of a database query, on a Windows form or Web form. In ASP, after filling a recordset (comparable to a DataTable object, roughly) with data, you would manually loop through each record in the resultset and build HTML dynamically. Although this is a very powerful and flexible way of building data-driven pages, often you ended up spending quite a bit of time tweaking the output. Rarely was the code reusable, so it had to be created by hand for each new page.

List controls solve these problems by wrapping up the aforementioned functionality into a single control that can be manipulated as ...