.NET DataGrid vs. 3rd party controls

[glenn]

I have not done much work with .NET yet but we are trying to decide
whether the grid that Microsoft provides is going to provide enough
functionality for us. As far as VB 6, we use the Videosoft FlexGrid
now and have found it to be very useful. Does anyone know what how
good/bad the .NET grid is? Are there different versions for web forms
versus windows forms?
Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Robert Jacobson]

There are two different versions -- the Windows Forms datagrid and the
ASP.Net datagrid. I've only used the Winforms one. It's adequate for
"flat-file" type access, but can't handle hierarchical data very well. (You
have to "navigate" to a subtable, like going to a new page in a browser.)
You can design around this a bit by using a master-detail form with two (or
more) grids liked together, but it's a kludge.

There are many third-party grid controls for Winforms, and almost any will
have more functionality than the Microsoft Winforms datagrid. I'm using the
Janus Gridex control, and am fairly pleased with it. There are other
popular grids from SyncFusion, Infragistics and xCeed.

 

[Dmitriy Lapshin [C# / .NET MVP]]

Meaning absolutely no offense, I'd still say that the standard Windows Forms
DataGrid is sometimes extremely hard to customize and also seems to have
several minor bugs (as of Microsoft .NET 1.0), judging by posts to this
newsgroup and to related ones. When you need only basic functionality - it
works just fine. Should you want to add any advanced features - you will
likely choose some 3rd party grid where these features might be already
available or easily implemented.

P.S. I've read somewhere on Microsoft website that they expect to release a
much more improved DataGrid control in their next major release of the .NET
Framework.