Binding Controls to Data in Visual Studio

Article
04/28/2015

You can display data to users of your application by binding data to controls. You can create these data-bound controls by dragging items from the Data Sources window onto a design surface in Visual Studio.

This topic describes the data sources you can use to create data-bound controls. It also describes some of the general tasks involved in data binding. For more specific details about how to create data-bound controls, see Binding Windows Forms Controls to Data in Visual Studio, Binding WPF Controls to Data in Visual Studio and Binding Silverlight Controls to Data in Visual Studio.

Data Sources

A data source represents the data that is available to your application. You can create data sources from databases, services, or objects. For more information, see Data Sources Overview.

Some data sources enable you to create data-bound controls by dragging items from the Data Sources window, while other data sources do not. The following table shows which data sources are supported.

Data source	Drag-and-drop support in the Windows Forms Designer	Drag-and-drop support in the WPF Designer	Drag-and-drop support in the Silverlight Designer
Dataset	Yes	Yes	No
Entity Data Model	No1	Yes	Yes
LINQ to SQL classes	No2	No2	No2
Services (including WCF Data Services, WCF services, and Web services)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Object	Yes	Yes	Yes
SharePoint	Yes	Yes	Yes

1. When the Windows Forms Designer is open, entities in the Data Sources window are read-only and cannot be dragged to the designer. However, you can still create data-bound controls by adding a new object data source that is based on the Entity Data Model, and then dragging those objects to the designer.

2. LINQ to SQL classes do not appear in the Data Sources window. However, you can add a new object data source that is based on LINQ to SQL classes, and then drag those objects to the designer to create data-bound controls. For more information, see Walkthrough: Creating LINQ to SQL Classes (O/R Designer).

Data Sources Window

Data sources are available to your project as items in the Data Sources window. You can drag items from this window to create controls that are bound to the underlying data. For more information, see Data Sources Window.

For each data type that appears in the Data Sources window, a default control is created when you drag the item to the designer. Before you drag an item from the Data Sources window, you can change the control that will be created. For more information, see How to: Set the Control to be Created when Dragging from the Data Sources Window.

Tasks Involved in Binding Controls to Data

The following table lists some of the most common tasks you follow to bind controls to data.

Task	More information
Open the Data Sources window	How to: Open the Data Sources Window
Add a data source to your project	How to: Connect to Data in a Database How to: Connect to Data in Objects How to: Connect to Data in a Service
Set the control that is created when you drag an item from the Data Sources window to the designer.	How to: Set the Control to be Created when Dragging from the Data Sources Window
Modify the list of controls that are associated with items in the Data Sources window.	How to: Add Custom Controls to the Data Sources Window
Create data-bound controls.	Binding Windows Forms Controls to Data in Visual Studio Binding WPF Controls to Data in Visual Studio Binding Silverlight Controls to Data in Visual Studio

After you create controls that are bound to data, you might want to do one of the following tasks.

Task	For More Information
Edit the data in the underlying data source	Editing Data in Your Application
Validate changes that were made to the data	Validating Data
Save updated data back to the database	Saving Data

Binding Controls to Data in Visual Studio

Data Sources

Data Sources Window

Tasks Involved in Binding Controls to Data

See Also

Tasks

Concepts

Other Resources

Additional resources