title: Is the ASP.net GridView control a clever design?
body: <p>I have been using gridview since a long time. I have a "cant live with you and cant live without you" relationship with it.</p>
  
  <p>The idea of Edits, inserts and deletes from within the grid is great but having to do something like</p>
  
  <pre><code>var sometext = ((TextBox)editRow.FindControl("tbSomeText")).Text;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>just seems very un-clever to me. Has anyone comeup with a solution or knows (resource) where you perform CRUD operations + paging and sorting from within the grid and dont have to write ugly code (like above). I am not looking for solutions using DataSource objects since I am not its biggest fan. I will be happy if someone can tell me how to live without GridView in asp.net.</p>
  
  <p>I understand there are AJAX implementations but I am looking for something completely serverside.</p>