Today I stumbled across a great blog by Erik Porter on Strongly Typed Collections and Windows Forms DataBinding. I’ve recently been working with Strongly Typed Collections and finally discovered the piece of the puzzle that was missing for me. It’s easy to see how you can add and remove items and bind the object to controls such as a combobox, but what about the datagrid?
If you set such an object as the DataSource everything appears and you can edit it, but can you add an item? For a while this became a problem where I wanted to use my own object, but I really needed it to work with a DataGrid like a dataset does. This is where we turn to IBindingList. By implementing the IBindingList interface we can take advantage of it’s grid based capabilities that allows things like a DataGrid to work with it. Rockford Lhotka has a great article on MSDN and also details it in his book Expert One-on-One Visual Basic .NET Business Objects.
The key is adding the implements statement and all of the required properties that go with it
Public Class People
Inherits CollectionBase
Implements IBindingList
Check out the sample code in the MSDN article for all of the property details hidden in the IBindingList region.
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