The Web is a collection of interesting but somewhat confusing technologies and innovations that have evolved over the last 20 or so years based on one key requirement: to deliver content in a platform-independent manner. The Web started as simple, platform-independent HTML and grew significantly with the addition of technologies such as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and XML. The driving force behind the Web has been that users and developers have expected the same robustness that a regular Windows-based application delivers.
The previous chapter examined the Windows DataGridView class in detail. Ideally, we want the DataGridView features to also be available in Web-based applications. This chapter examines the Web-based data grid control, the GridView. You will see that the GridView is more similar to the DataGridView than previous Web data grids were to the Windows data grids.