I find that many of the complex M$ controls are implemented in an  inelegant way that makes them almost totally useless. The grid control in .NET is infuriating to use, even though it does a vast amount of stuff "for" me it almost never does what I want it to do. For one, it fails to give me adequate CSS stylesheet control over its extraordinarily ugly default appearance. It is also really hard to extend the grid control with clientside scripts.

 
I attempted to use it some time ago, but I gave up after I had spent as much time trying to override a whole slew of thoroughly unwanted behavior as it took to simply build an html table and add the client side and server side behaviors.

 

On the other hand, I do like the .NET Table objects because they give you a very powerful metaphor for building and modifying HTML tables. You can build up tables in a variety of ways, and then pass the built-up table to other code that adds additional functionality on the client and server sides. It makes for a lot of code reuse and data/interface flexibility.   The table objects are thankfully elegant and simple which is why they are so useful, unlike the bloated grid control.

 

What is nice is about AjaxPro is that it handles the serialization of complex data for you so you can build functions that work on both sides very efficiently without a lot of really complex code. I also like it because it works.

 

When Microsoft talks about all of this stuff that they are going to be doing for me in Atlas, I worry about it being yet more bloatware. The new Atlas stuff isn't even really released yet, either. I may take a look at it when it is more mature, but so far the AjaxPro stuff works just fine for me.

 

I have built several very complex objects including a tree / grid combo. I also have Table object with sorting columns and paging support, row selection & mouseovers and so on. It was about four days of work, but I used it in different ways several times it my current application. It is sure a lot faster to do this work on the client side instead of repainting the page with a postback. The tree / grid combo was even more work, but it does specifically what I wanted it to do. So my employers are very happy with the results.
 

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