So it has happened again - Microsoft has developed a reasonable control for newbies that's not quite enterprise-class... that control is the ASP.NET 2.0 ObjectDataSource control. Feature rich - works great - but when it comes to complex objects... yeah... and what if you just want to bind to a singleton class that's passed in to a sub-control? Forgettaboutit.
I'm not the first to realize the pain... Brian Johnson, blogging at dotnet.org.za, actually wrote down the scenario I have shared with others in a blog post titled "ASP.NET 2 Data Binding Hell"... the scenario I'm talking about is that of Microsoft building a tool to a point... and then letting all the heavy hitters (senior-level devs / designers and above) down...
But did they?
Another blog entry I found, this one from Nikhil Kothari, a member of the ASP.NET team, talks about how to create a "custom" data source. Nikhil actually grazes the issue and demonstrates how to quickly create your own custom data source. Now - like Microsoft demos, this again tends to fall short - but it was enough to get the juices flowing on a couple of roadblocks I'm facing at work with our new enterprise framework. The one thing that would have been more helpful would have been if Nikhil at talked to some concepts on how to do some universal reuse here - in otherwords - how to create enhancements to the ObjectDataSource. But I'll get by.
When I've done some experimenting with this, and some additional hands-on, I'll blog more about my success/failure/frustrations.