Programming Data-Driven Web Applications with ASP.NET

Data Binding

Data binding in .NET is different than it was in previous Microsoft products. In .NET, data binding means binding any property of any .NET control to any publicly available information. It accesses data in the form of classes that expose raw data as properties and, in many cases, defines methods for updating the data. “Data” is a rather broad term in .NET. It might be values from a data store, names of controls from a collection, or attribute values from an object property. As you can see, this requires a slight shift in thinking from previous data access methods.

Complex controls that include embedded controls, such as the DataGrid, can bind to any class that supports the ICollection interface, such as a DataTable, DataReader, array, ...