Question

I’ve been a C# programmer for about 2 years total, and professionally for a little more than 1. I work at a company as a developer on an application that began before the days of .NET 2. My question is this:

What is the benefit to use databinding from sql queries directly to a control over querying and manually adding items to the control? Is this approach generally considered cleaner, and simpler in terms of deploying? Will there still be cases where manually adding would give more fine grained control over the display / value of the data?

I’m asking because I’ve been assigned some bugs that deal with some controls that populate themselves based off query results, and would love to clean up unnecessary logic and push that off to the libraries to handle instead of me.

Note: We are using .NET 2.0

Answer 1

I personally find that using the

control.DataSource = YourSource; control.DataBind(); 

process is much easier, you don’t have to do the iteration, and overall reduces LOC.

If working with DropDownLists and other controls you will most likely set the DataValueField and DataTextField properties as well.