Some time ago, (or here in the wonderfully virtual web world), I questioned the whole aspect of all this pile of controls in ASP.NET. Of course, you’ve got the grids and listviews, and you also have all the radio buttons, checkboxes. But then you’ve got a separate validator for each kind of validation you want to use, and even validators to let you combine other validators in “AND” and “OR” logical relations.

My thoughts were “Jeez. this is madness.”

Wouldn’t a single control that you could adapt to different display behaviors, validation rules etc be much easier to work with and create a more maintainable solution?

Well, apparently someone at Microsoft had the same bright idea, at least with the new ListView control in ASP.NET 3.5.

Take a read of Fritz Onion’s article in the latest MSDN magazine.

He describes the new ListView as a control that can “literally replace all other databinding controls in ASP.NET. That’s right. Every last one.”

Now, if they’d do the same for that validation nonsense, we might be getting somewhere!