The new DataGridView is the .NET 2.0 answer to the woefully underpowered DataGrid control that was the standard in .NET 1.x. Among the many improvements that Matthew MacDonald discusses here, the DataGridView supports extensive customization and fine-grained formatting, flexible sizing and selection, better performance, and a richer event model.
The first two releases of the .NET Framework (.NET 1.0 and .NET 1.1) left a glaring gap in the data-binding picture. Although developers had a flexible, configurable model for linking almost any control to almost any data source, they didn't have a practical way to display full tables of information. The only tool included for this purpose was the DataGrid control, which worked well for simple demonstrations but was woefully inadequate for real-world code.
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