I've just been reading the press release and features for the forthcoming Silverlight grid.  Looks very exciting.

From the features page:-

'Smooth-scrolling animations. Reduces the perception of lag thanks to the time required to execute the smooth scrolling effect. Fades in empty rows and data once they arrive. Also improves readability by letting the eye track record data as it is scrolled: instead of jumping into existence, it moves fluidly into place.'

Sounds a lot like TableFlow. 

Will it handle variable height rows?

Can you confirm there will be a WPF build?

Can you post a feature comparison with the current grid?  What might I lose if I move to the new grid?

Thanks

Michael

Hi Michael,

Here is the answer I received from the lead developer on the project:

While it’s true the basic description sounds like WPF’s TableFlow view, there are key differences between the 2 products.

First of all, the Silverlight DataGrid has been built from the ground up for Silverlight 4, rather than being ported from the WPF product. This gave us the opportunity to improve on the DataGrid layout engine, as well as tackle some scenarios differently. Without going too deep into technical details, the 2 major points what this difference gives us is:

- True hierarchical display of groups: You actually have a visual element that enclose the whole group’s content.
- Animation for any modifications of the layout (scrolling, group expansion/collapsing, modifications to data source content, ... )

Then, because Silverlight is bound to be used with web services quite often, we wanted to improve the story by completely overhauling the way we handle data sources to take into considerations the particularities of large virtualized data sources. This gave us a virtualization engine that handles all the paging and objects lifetime for the application developers, and does it in the most optimized and efficient way possible.

Now combine advanced data virtualization to a UI engine built specifically to leverage all these aspects, and that is the essence of the Silverlight DataGrid (that being said, we do handle local data sources very well too! ;) )

Concerning your two other questions:

- WPF Build: Yes, it is in our plans to provide a WPF build of the Silverlight DataGrid, but it might not be available at release time for V1.0.
- Feature comparison chart: I noted this question and forwarded it to our marketing department to see if they can cook something up. 

In the meantime, what I can say is that the Silverlight DataGrid will obviously not have all the same advanced features as our WPF DataGrid, which have been in constant development/improvement for 4+ years. What you can expect is a DataGrid that contains all the conventional Grouping, Sorting, Editing, Filtering features plus the Data Virtualization, Animations, Navigation aspects.

From that point, we plan to rapidly improve the advanced features of the Silverlight DataGrid, just like we did with the WPF DataGrid, by releasing a new version every few months.

Note: It will not handle variable height rows in the first release.

Odi

Sounds like the future but disappointed that there will still be no support for variable height rows.  Is it anywhere on the roadmap?

Michael