>Actually, I think, at first glance, that I have done a lot of things in a similar way that you have done. Not all though ... I have not implemented databinding to objects, as you have. But, hey, it's a great idea if you need it (I guess I haven't run into needing it ... yet).

Yeah much of that same code is in my Windows Form binding controls too, although there the process is considerably easier as you can actually use the built in databinding to a large extent. Both sets use binding to objects and ADO.Net objects. The binding to objects is really handy because you can do things like in VFP where you bind to properties of the form for example for things like Wizards and utilitie forms. You bind to the form properties which are then picked up by the calling code. I also have several small system type apps that don't use data at all (they use serialization for persistence) and it's really useful to be able to bind to objects in that case as well.

This was a really good excercise BTW in learning about how to 'dynamic' assignmnets in a variety of different ways, but it was surprisingly easy to do once I got started with it...

THe big payoff is now though. ASP.Net pages have almost no databinding logic at all (except the two calls to bind and unbind). I don't even use ViewState on most pages because as part of that process I was able to handle persistance of things like ListBoxes and Combos through the property post backs that they somehow decided not implement in ASP.Net (you need viewstate to get a selection back in ASP.Net for example).

I will eventually put all this together in an article and probably a small toolset, but it'll take some time to sort out completely <g>...

There are some downsides to this too. Using custom controls you loose some of the built-in Intellisense in design mode and you don't automatically inherit the namesapces for child controls (like asp:listitem can't be inherited automatically to ww:listitem if I subclass the listbox). But I can live with that since the HTML IDE sucks anyway in VS <g>...

+++ Rick ---

>
>Anywho, thanks for giving me some more things to study. I'll let you know if I end up doing any of my stuff differently and borrow from some of your code samples. So far what I've implemented seems to be working just fine, but I've barely gotten into the web side of things, so who knows what's down the road.
>
>Thanks again,
>~~Bonnie