VIBlend DataGridView for WinForms offers multiple unique features that cannot be found in other Windows Forms data grid controls. These include multi-level hierarchies on rows and columns, rows grouping, pivot tables, and built-in OLAP capabilities. One of the main drawbacks of the traditional OLAP style rows layout is that it takes a lot of screen space. 

This could be improved by using the compact style layout. In this mode the rows of the pivot table are rendered in a tree-like structure.

Switching from default to compact style rendering is very easy. It requires setting the value of RowsHierarchy.CompactStyleRendering property to true:

C#
grid.RowsHierarchy.CompactStyleRenderingEnabled = true;
grid.RowsHierarchy.AutoResize();
grid.Invalidate();

VB .Net
grid.RowsHierarchy.CompactStyleRenderingEnabled = True
grid.RowsHierarchy.AutoResize()
grid.Invalidate()

You can switch between traditional and compact style rendering at runtime. The feature is also availalbe in VIBlend DataGrid for Silverlight.

In this blog post we will show you how to use the VIBlend DataGridView for WinForms in a WPF application.

The following code example creates a WinForms DataGrid control with Office2010Black theme in a WPF application. This example uses a WindowsFormsHost element to place the DataGrid control within the main window’s root  element. The WindowsFormsHost element could be found in the WindowsFormsIntegration.dll.

[xaml]

  <Window x:Class="HostWinFormsControlInWPF.Window1"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
        xmlns:viblend="clr-namespace:VIBlend.WinForms.DataGridView;assembly=VIBlendGrid"
        Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
    <Grid>
        <WindowsFormsHost>
            <viblend:vDataGridView x:Name="VIBlendDataGrid" VIBlendTheme="OFFICE2010BLACK"/>               
        </WindowsFormsHost>
    </Grid>
</Window>

In order to bind the data grid, you need to do the following:  Click on the Data menu item in your Visual Studio, then select the “Add new DataSource” item.  Browse to the Nwind.mdb which ships with the WinForms controls installation, choose the Employees table and click finish. In the code behind, after the InitializeComponent call or in the Load event handler , bind the data grid to the Employees table.

            NwindDataSet dataSet = new NwindDataSet();
            EmployeesTableAdapter adapter = new EmployeesTableAdapter();
            adapter.Fill(dataSet.Employees);
            this.VIBlendDataGrid.DataSource = dataSet.Employees.DefaultView;
            this.VIBlendDataGrid.DataBind();

Here is the result:

We are proud to announce the second major release of VIBlend Controls for Silverlight.

With the new release, VIBlend has officially included in the suite four new controls – OutlookPane, NavigationPane, DateTimePicker and ScrollablePanel. Not only we introduced new controls, but we also improved the quality and functionality of the existing ones and added over 10 new examples to show how our controls work.

The Menu and Context Menu controls from the toolset are now provided free of charge to all registered users.

See our Silverlight Controls Live Demo and Download a free trial today.