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Control Grid Elements
by Ken Cox

August 6, 2004

Adding a sophisticated component to your application is much like adding a new developer to your team: Productivity drops during the learning curve, but you'll be further ahead in the long run. Xceed Software makes the introduction of its versatile WinForms grid component, Xceed Grid for .NET 2.1, as smooth as possible by providing a WYSIWYG design-time experience and built-in documentation. Xceed Grid lets you create master-detail and grouped views and gives you fine-grained control over grid elements.

Xceed Grid succeeds at providing precise design-time and runtime control over its headers, rows, columns, and groups. Within the Visual Studio .NET environment, you can select distinct objects directly on the form. It takes only a few seconds to get a feel for selecting elements with the mouse; popup selectors appear as you hover over the headers and rows.

The separate objects allow easy control over colors, borders, and height and width properties. For example, you can create a multicolored grid by adding several datarow templates, then highlight one column by overriding all row styles for the column. Design-challenged developers can choose from a baker's dozen of prepared stylesheets.

Thanks to the granularity of objects, you have a wider choice of editors for manipulating data at run time. For example, you could assign a standard slider control as the editor for a given column. Xceed demonstrates the grid's flexibility by using the component to build an action game and a treeview, and it includes the source code for both.

The grid renders quickly and performs well at run time. You can group data easily by dragging and dropping column headers into the upper area. It would be nice to have some built-in right-click functionality to expand or collapse all groups.

Xceed Grid tries to bolster the control's onscreen user assistance in two ways. When you drop the grid onto your form at design time, the lower half displays the Grid Assistant (see Figure 1). The Assistant is a set of hyperlinked pages that take you through configuration steps either sequentially or by jumping from task to task. This is a good idea, but I found that the descriptive text isn't sufficient to get the job done. The other feature—documentation embedded in tooltips—is fine in theory, but tooltips disappear before you can read the complete text.

The online help is adequate, but the tutorials—such as the one on building a data-bound grid—need more precise steps. They can confuse newbies at times by offering multiple ways to accomplish one task.

Xceed has produced a highly capable grid that doesn't take days to learn. The sample code (in VB.NET and C#) is nicely done. The standard license includes royalty-free runtimes, and the component's source code is available in the higher-priced Blueprint Edition.

Xceed Grid for .NET 2.1
Xceed Software
Web: www.xceedsoft.com
Phone: 800-865-2626; 450-442-2626
Price: $399.95
Quick Facts: Data grid for WinForms with fine design-time control over column, row, and group settings.
Pros: Flexible and easy to learn; performs well; royalty-free runtime; source code available; good samples.
Cons: Tutorials are confusing; on-screen assistant not sufficiently helpful.

About the Author
Ken Cox is a programming writer and .NET developer in Toronto building e-commerce Web applications, XML Web services, and SharePoint Web Parts. Ken is a Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET. Reach him at .