Sams Teach Yourself ADO.NET in 24 Hours

Hour 9. Binding Data to List Controls

The focus of this chapter will be on the requirements, from the ADO.NET perspective, for binding data to various controls such as ListControls and DataGrids. Data binding is necessary to link the Web or Windows form's UI controls to the data that is retrieved from a data source. When the control is activated or initiated, an underlying manager goes about initiating whatever was bound to the control (for example, a data retrieval using a SqlDataAdapter that fills a DataSet that is bound to a DataGrid). The whole binding mechanism does all of the heavy lifting of mapping the control to the data (like a DataSet, DataTable, and so on). What you will see is that if you know how to bind data to a ListBox control, ...