Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET

Data Grids

Although the preceding sample relies heavily on .NET and VS.NET data features to reduce our coding, the list controls can take us only so far toward data-centric application nirvana. For example, the list box supports the display only of a single column from the underlying data set and provides no built-in UI for adding, editing, or deleting rows. For those features and a boatload of others, we've got the data grid.

The DataGrid control supports complex binding to list data sources. However, it does it a lot more thoroughly than do the list controls discussed so far. For one thing, a data grid can show all the columns, as shown in Figure 13.26.

Figure 13.26. Binding to a DataGrid

Binding a data source to the DataGrid control requires ...