A first look at the Dynamic Data Engine—the DynamicGridView Control

Dynamic Data Controls are a new family of strongly-typed data-oriented controls made available with the first CTP of ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions. Right after installing the package, a brand new project template shows up in your Visual Studio 2008 project box - Dynamic Data Web site. If you choose to create such a new project, you instantly get a complete Web application that just works and allows you to view and edit all the tables bound to a given LINQ-to-SQL domain model. Put another way, the Dynamic Data engine can give you a back-office application to edit and fill the contents consumed by a Web application. At least for relatively simple admin scenarios, you get the final code in a matter of seconds. And all that you have to do is point the web.config file of the auto-generated project to your LINQ-to-SQL DBML class.

The Web application you get in this way contains a few predefined pages and user controls and makes use of a handful of new data-bound controls. By editing page templates and user controls, you can further customize the vanilla code, polish and adapt it to your needs and preferences. At this point, many developers spend their time trying to figure out how to adapt the scaffolded site to their needs. Customization may happen at several levels. You can change page templates, indicate ad hoc pages for displaying data from certain tables, change the way in which a few data types are rendered and edited, add attributes to your domain model that the scaffolded site will automatically recognize and dynamically apply.

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