WPF Grid Controls in the real world

 

Grids are one of the most common ui elements I’ve seen in line of business applications. Nearly every view requires one, or even more grid elements. Unfortunately, WPF does not provide its own grid control. To be more exactly: It provides no applicable grid control in terms of a table to view and edit data. Of course WPF has a grid control. It is a simple layouting element to place a bunch of controls in a well-regulated manner.
But which control can be used to manage data in a tabular style? In my opinion there are three ways to achieve this:

• The first approach is quite hard. It utilizes the grid control and is based upon styles and templates. In other words: Your have to build your own control based on WPF default mechanisms. Due to its complexity I dont want to dive into this topic. It would be beyond the scope of this article. Rather I’d like to recommend you an article, published in the MSDN Magazine’s german edition: WPF – A Life without DataGrids. It explains this approach in-depth.
• The second option is to use XCeeds’s "DataGrid for WPF". This third party control ships in several versions whereas the express edition (which is sufficiant for most applications) is free!
• The last alternative is to use the commercial "Infragistics NetAdvantage for WPF" suite.

I recommend you to try at least two alternatives and decide which fits best to your requirements regarding performance, development time and priceing.

 

Technorati-Tags: WPF , Grid , XCeed , Infragistics