Best Practice: Potentially huge Winform grid?

Question

Hi

I am writing an application in VB.NET 2008 that manages software deployment and I want to display a "deployment overview" grid.

The grid will be populated with the names of each application (top row) and the name of each workstation (1st column). The remaining cells will be populated according to whether the corresponding software title has been installed correctly, install failed OR not deployed.

What would be the best way to present this information to the end-user? Could the application 'cope' with maybe a thousand check boxes or would it be better to 'owner-draw' a grid in some way?

I may also require the ability to click on any of these cells to view and/or set other properties.

Many thanks for your help.

John

Answer 1

Guvante, I'm sorry if you feel that way. I already know what I would like my GUI to look like; I'm simply asking advice as to how other programmers would approach it.

Answer 2

I have used the .NET's GridDataView without any problems using the Virtual Mode while trying to show over 10000 rows but there are good products out there that are also very good in loading tons of data like Developer express XtraGrid and Telerik's RadGridView.

The only challenge was keep the UAT people happy with all the noise from several thousands of rows.