MIX07 Update: Dynamic Data Controls

I just attended a session by Polita Paulus and Mahesh Prakriya on Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET.

Here is the basic concept behind these controls - take the standard grid controls and instead of configuring them, point the controls instead at a database and they configure themselves.

Polita demonstrated simply taking a page, calling it the name of the table you want to display, and up comes all the controls you need for editing, filtering, deleting, inserting and linking to child/parent tables. Pretty interesting stuff especially for those creating quick one-off web apps. You can extend the controls pretty easily as the dynamic data controls can extend any of the standard ASP.NET data driven controls such as DataGrid, DataList, etc. You can then extend them as normal using data binding, custom formatting, extension through event binding, etc.

The current CTP only supports the SQL Datasource through connection strings. Forget the idea of using these dynamic data controls to build off of objects, web services, XML, etc.

The bad news is that the only recommendation for these types of heterogeneous (e.g. any serious real world scenario these days) provided seems to be to support a LINQ data source, which is Microsoft's new way of doing O/R mapping and language integrated query. The answer to having heterogeneous data sources, classes, business rules, etc. from Polita was wait until you get the LINQ datasource and then use that as the basis for all your data needs.

I'm going to the LINQ data source presentation next, but this seems problematic and limiting as an overall one size fits all strategy. When we use ASP.NET data controls today, we rarely use the Wizard type approach - instead we're doing heavy duty business objects that generate very simply array lists of custom built value objects. This is especially true with distributed scenarios such as web services integration.

But I'm onto the LINQ presentation next, so maybe it's the panacea after all! :)