Here at Developer Express we have a lot to thank the humble Grid for. As you probably know the QuantumGrid was our first really popular Component Suite, and we have been able to extend that with a broad range of embeddable editors, and ultimately take the grid concept in many different directions from the 90 degree transform of the Vertical Grid, the hierarchical TreeList, to the "Slice-n-Dice" of the Pivot Grid, and even the sparse form of the Spreadsheet. From our start with VCL and ActiveX we've brought many of these to new platforms like Winforms, ASP.NET, WPF and soon Silverlight.
The QuantumGrid these days has almost as many lines of code as the VCL itself, has undergone over a decade of refinement,
and offers drop in functionality that is I reckon unequaled by any
other Component suite on the market.
In some ways we probably have a grid oriented view on development. Sure we have other popular suites like Reporting and Menu Bars and of course CodeRush, but the grid lies at the core of many of the applications our customers tell us they build. Rather than trying to work out what data a user may want to see, the QuantumGrid allows a developer to offer up all the data and let the customer sort/group/filter using familiar UIs (from Access, Excel and Outlook) into whatever shape they need, and then with one line of code use the PrintingSystem to turn it into a custom report. It's pretty powerful stuff.
I remember the first time I used a Devexpress suite, 3 years before I was to join the company, I was working on tools for analyzing Risk. We had to show a lot of data from thousands of individual financial instruments. We used the QuantumGrid because it gave our customers the ability to sort/group/filter that large amount of data. Sure we could have built a custom grid from scratch, and added new ways to show the data as customers were able to identify their requirements and iterate through many request-implement-deliver cycles ... or we could just embed the QuantumGrid and focus on the math.
So what is your QuantumGrid story? Are Grids that important to your development?