How would you explain databinding to your grandmother?

Question

today i thought about how to explain a databind in asp.net that also a grandmother is able to imagine it. I couldn't but use it every day.

Answer 1

When you databind something, you are telling the thing you type into where to put what gets typed into it and where to get what it shows.

Best I could come up with...

Answer 2

For the average Grandma...

Well, Grandma, the computer shows you different controls that can be used. For example, there's this button control (pointing to the screen) and a label control (pointing to the screen) and here's a textbox control...

Databinding takes information in the computer and automatically puts the information in to controls that make sense. So if your computer has information about, say, an employee, for example, and you want to show it on the screen, then you could bind the person's first name to the FirstName textbox...

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For MY Grandma.

Here's a link to Databinding on MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752347.aspx

You can try it out for yourself if you Google "Visual Studio Express Editions" and download them & install them.

Answer 3

Databinding to me is when you are trying to write a program to do something with information, but you don't want to have to go back and tell it over and over again what to do when the information changes.

So you might have it show pictures of the grandkids, but if new pictures arrive, you don't want to have to tell it to display them, you just want it to know to do that.

Am I close?