Question

I’m a beginner at ASP.net. I want to create a custom GridView where it contains images and such.

But i’ve searched a lot for a guide that explains how to customize GridView controller. All existing ones (the ones i found of course) only talks about how to do a certain uses out of it, like e-commerce site Gridview, or inline Gridview and others. But none are explaining it for a beginner like me.

If there’s a guide or even a good book for using and customizing ASP.net controls, i’d be grateful if you mentioned it.

Answer 1

Question 1 – Good ASP.NET book

The book that really helped me learn ASP.NET was – 70-515 Web Application Development With Microsoft .NET Framework 4

The only prerequisite for this book is C# or VB.NET and some basic HTML knowledge, it assumes that the reader has never done ASP.NET before and all the examples are really easy to follow.At the end of every chapter there are step by step labs which guide you to create a sample website based on what you’ve learned in that chapter.

Here are some topics which the book covers:

1. ASP.NET Page life cycle
2. ASP.NET server controls
3. Data bound controls (GridView,DetailsView,ObjectDataSource,SqlDataSource)
4. Validation and site navigation
5. Data access in ASP.NET
6. Localization and Globalization
7. AJAX and javascript (jQuery)
8. ASMX web services and WCF
9. ASP.NET Dynamic Data and MVC
10. Deploying and monitoring an ASP.NET application

If it sounds like something you’d be interested in I bought mine from amazon but I know oreilly stock it as well

Question 2 – starting with GridView

If you want to learn working with the gridview I would suggest starting with the basics e.g. binding to a List<T>:

ASPX:

<asp:GridView ID="gvEmployees" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false">
    <Columns>
        <asp:BoundField DataField="Id" HeaderText="Id" />
        <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Employee name" />
    </Columns>
</asp:GridView>

Code behind:

public partial class WebForm1 : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (!IsPostBack)
        {
            gvEmployees.DataSource = new List<Employee>()
            {
            new Employee{ Id=1,Name="Employee 1"},
            new Employee{ Id=2,Name="Employee 2"}
            };

            gvEmployees.DataBind();
        }
    }
}

public class Employee
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

Once you have the basics just play around with the gridview and try binding to different types of objects and you’ll get a hang of it in no time:

1. Binding gridview to a SQL Table
2. Bind gridview to image list