What is the current feeling about the use of databound controls? When I first started using a RAD framework I remember many people on the message boards that I belonged to were very much against the use of databound controls.
IMO they greatly speed up development - but are they considered a good practice in the industry?
I think databound controls are great! I would also consider them to be a good practice considering the fact that Microsoft themselves use it extensively and continue to do so throughout the .NET framework.
They are definitely considered a good practice by the industry. Data-bound controls are elements of UI Data binding which is a software design pattern for simplifying development of GUI applications.
It leads to good practises, see this link for elegant uses of databound controls: techniques for implementing these common data access patterns in ASP.NET 2.0 . You might actually find a lot more interesting stuff.