Question

I just started teaching myself Linq to SQL today. I hardly know anything about linq. That being said, I have a query that i want to return a Name from my database. It is a varchar in the DB

var query = from a in FRESH.Customers
            select a.CUSTOMER_NAME;

dataGridView1.DataSource = query;

This results in a gridview with a column named “Length” and displays the length of every name. If I change the query to select a everything displays fine. What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

The DataGridView will by default show all of the properties of the type in the list as columns. Since your query is returning a collection of strings and the only¹ “property” of a string is Length it shows that as a column.

Try changing to

var query = from a in FRESH.Customers
            select new {Name = a.CUSTOMER_NAME};

¹Technically the indexer Chars is a “property” but the DataGridView must be clever enough not to use an indexer as a column.