Mad Props!

Here's a screenshot of a form from one of the projects I'm working on right now. I'm posting this to give people an idea of what's possible if you use the CellPainting event in the DataGridView control to override how your grid is painted.

What I'm doing here is displaying the contents of two different child tables in the same grid cell as the parent table row. One set of child rows is being rendered as a bar graph, the other is simply being written as plain text. This gives the user a really rich visual experience when he would otherwise be looking at a simple list of category names. Click on the image for the full-sized version:

Pretty cool, huh? It's a "web 2.0" sort of effect in a Windows Forms app. A testament to what the plain old DataGridView control is capable of.