In ASP.NET 3.5, Microsoft introduced two new databound controls: the ListView and DataPager control which you can use to display and paginate your data in extremely flexible way. In this tutorial I will show you how you can use ListView control to display data from the database. I will introduce you how different templates in ListView control work and how you can use ListView control to render any type of HTML markup you want.

The ListView control can be thought as a super flexible GridView control. You can use it to display, edit, delete, select, sort and page your data just like GridView. However unlike GridView control it is totally template driven which means developers need to use its different templates to control the rendered output markup just as they do in Repeater control. This gives developers flexibility to generate HTML tables, div, span or any other tags to generate their data output. In ListView control Microsoft combines all the good features of Repeater, DataList, GridView, DetailsView and FormView controls in a single more powerful and flexible control.