Question

I’ve been doing ASP.NET development for a little while now, and I’ve used both the GridView and the DataGrid controls before for various things, but I never could find a really good reason to use one or the other. I’d like to know:

What is the difference between these 2 ASP.NET controls? What are the advantages or disadvantages of both? Is one any faster? Newer? Easier to maintain?

The intellisense summary for the controls doesn’t seem to describe any difference between the two. They both can view, edit, and sort data and automatically generate columns at runtime.

Edit: Visual Studio 2008 no longer lists DataGrid as an available control in the toolbox. It is still available (for legacy support I assume) if you type it in by hand though.

Answer 1

DataGrid was an ASP.NET 1.1 control, still supported. GridView arrived in 2.0, made certain tasks simpler added different databinding features:

This link has a comparison of DataGrid and GridView features –

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/05yye6k9(v=vs.100).aspx