discussion: has someone built an super-enhanced dataLIST control

[Guest]

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

 

[Guest]

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