We can't help it. We love grids. We love new technology. So the opportunity to marry them together is irresistible. Here's a very early preview of what could become a new product, although I emphasize there is a very long way to go. So don't ask about release dates or betas just yet, just enjoy.
We were slightly dissatisfied with the "force your ASP.NET controls to work in ASP.NET MVC" solution and wondered if there was a way to write a "native" control for ASP.NET MVC. You know the patter by now: MVC gives you full control over your HTML and CSS, etc, and ASP.NET controls tend to be "heavy" in that kind of environment. So, a team went off and did some experiments and wrote some code.
Here's a screenshot of the resulting control:
First off, it's read-only; no editing of data yet. But, nevertheless, it's fully interactive: click on the column headers to sort by those headers, drag a header to rearrange the columns:
As you can see by the navigation links bottom right, the grid is paged.
And the pièce de résistance: a snapshot of the HTML behind it:
Is that clean or what? Some nifty REST links, and it's all ready for that extra touch of custom CSS.
At present there's quite a bit of code that needs to be written to get this up-and-running, and, as this is likely to change, I won't go into any details here. But, note that MVC, in comparison to the traditional ASP.NET, will always require you to write some code. It's that whole "getting full control" thing again.
But, despite all that, a brilliant bit of work from our ASP.NET MVC team. Thanks, guys.