Who actually uses DataGrid/GridView/FormView/etc i

Question

Curious if others feel the same as me. To me, controls such as datagrid/gridview/formview/etc. are great for presentations or demo's only. To take the time and tweak this controls, override their default behavior (hooking into their silly events etc.) is a big headache. The only control that I use is the repeater, since it offers me the most flexibility over the others.

In short, they are pretty much bloatware.

I'd rather weave my own html/css, use my own custom paging queries.

Again, if you need to throw up a quick page these controls are great (especially if you are trying to woo people into the ease of .NET development).

I must be in the minority, otherwise MS wouldn't dedicated so much development time on these types of controls... ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Answer 1

I like the GridView control and have used it in several custom DotNetNuke modules for my company's web site. For one thing, using the built-in controls means less dependencies to worry about. And once I had it set up how I wanted it, I basically copied the code to other pages and just had to do minor tweaks.

I've found that there are so many options with modern grid controls (Infragistics, Telerik, etc) that it takes longer to configure the grid than anything else. The MS controls are pretty simple yet they can do pretty much anything.

Answer 2

I never really used the standard WinForms grid before but at my last job we used the ComponentOne FlexGrid extensively and it worked beautifully. There were still some annoyances with trying to get all the customization we wanted but overall it saved us a ton of time and produced beautiful results.

Currently I'm working with Silverlight 3 and RIA Services and I can't imagine trying to produce what we're doing without the DataGrid and DataForm controls. The time being saved far outweighs any of the overhead.