I use a variety of controls made by a variety of vendors, including 
Microsoft.

In general the level of development on gridview-like presentational controls 
is very impressive. Telerik, Inc's r.a.d.Grid is spectacular, and the 
ASP.NET 2.0 GridView is not too shabby.

In contrast, the level of development of datalist controls is terrible given 
what I have seen so far. That is very annoying given that the datalist is 
one of the few controls which can render multiple columns and templated HTML 
well. I'm building a lot of views right now involving grids of databound 
photos, presented in a "contact sheet" format, and there seems no end to the 
number of things I've having to implement myself:

1) paging
2) selection via checkboxes
3) for efficiency, SQL select on only the current records
4) sorting
5) all client-side behaviors.
.... and so on.

This is all educational, but a waste of time given my other commitments. Can 
anyone point to something better, present or future?

-KF

This may help someone else. I didn't find any super-enhanced datalist 
control. However, the ListView and the DataPager that is a part of the .NET 
3.5 framework does solve my problems elegantly. Check it out if you have 
access to a server that can run 3.5.

-KF


<kenfine@nospam.nospam> wrote in message 
news:%237O$Fs%231HHA.4004@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...

>I use a variety of controls made by a variety of vendors, including 
>Microsoft.
>
> In general the level of development on gridview-like presentational 
> controls is very impressive. Telerik, Inc's r.a.d.Grid is spectacular, and 
> the ASP.NET 2.0 GridView is not too shabby.
>
> In contrast, the level of development of datalist controls is terrible 
> given what I have seen so far. That is very annoying given that the 
> datalist is one of the few controls which can render multiple columns and 
> templated HTML well. I'm building a lot of views right now involving grids 
> of databound photos, presented in a "contact sheet" format, and there 
> seems no end to the number of things I've having to implement myself:
>
> 1) paging
> 2) selection via checkboxes
> 3) for efficiency, SQL select on only the current records
> 4) sorting
> 5) all client-side behaviors.
> ... and so on.
>
> This is all educational, but a waste of time given my other commitments. 
> Can anyone point to something better, present or future?
>
> -KF
>