Improved Data Support

Visual Studio 2005 makes it much easier to work with data in your Windows Forms applications.

Drag and Drop Data Binding

You can easily create a data-driven Windows Forms application by dragging and dropping data onto a Form. You can use the new Data Source Configuration Wizard to easily setup a data source to an existing relational database, web service or business object. Once the data source is setup, you can use the new Data Sources Picker to generate a user interface bound to the data source.

Improved Business Object and Web Service Support

Visual Studio 2005 provides design time support for binding to both business objects and web services. One of the major improvements in this area is the ability to bind at design time to the shape of an object rather than an object instance.

More Flexible Data Binding

Numerous improvements have been made to simple property binding. With the new improvements, you are now able to specify when bound controls push their values to the back-end data source (on Validation, Property Change or Never). You have more flexibility with formatting including the ability to provide a mapping for DbNull values as well as the ability to automatically format values based on a formatting string.