Presenting Data with the DataGridView Control in .NET 2.0

Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio

This article—Presenting Data with the DataGridView Control in .NET 2.0—is from Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0, by Brian Noyes. Copyright © 2006 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. This article has been edited especially for C# Online.NET.  Read the book review!

THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS showed many detailed examples of data binding to simple bound controls and list bound controls. However, one of the most common ways of presenting data is in tabular form. Users are able to quickly scan and understand large amounts of data visually when it is presented in a table. In addition, users can interact with that data in a number of ways, including scrolling through the data, sorting the data based on columns, editing the data directly in the grid, and selecting columns, rows, or cells. In .NET 1.0, the DataGrid control was the primary Windows Forms control for presenting tabular data. Even though that control had a lot of capability and could present basic tabular data well, it was fairly difficult to customize many aspects of the control. Additionally, the DataGrid control didn’t expose enough information to the programmer about the user interactions with the grid and changes occurring in the grid due to programmatic modifications of the data or formatting. Due to these factors and a large number of new features that customers requested, the Windows Client team at Microsoft decided to introduce a replacement control for the DataGrid in .NET 2.0. That new control, the DataGridView control, is the focus of this chapter.