Bindings for DataGridView hosted in an MFC application

A WinForms DataGridView control has the ability to automatically generate its columns and populate from a specified data source (which can be a DataSet, a simple list or something else). All you have to do is something like this:

var list = new List<Record>() {new Record() {Id = 1, Name = "item 1", Date = DateTime.Now}};

this.dataGridView.AutoGenerateColumns = true;
this.dataGridView.DataSource = list;

When you do the same in MFC, it doesn’t work (supposing that you followed all the steps for hosting a WinForms control in an MFC application as described in MSDN).

m_dgv->AutoGenerateColumns = true;
auto source = gcnew System::Collections::Generic::List<Record^>();
auto r1 = gcnew Record();
r1->Id = 1;
r1->Name = "item 1";
r1->Date = System::DateTime::Now;
source->Add(r1);

m_dgv->DataSource = source;

After debugging through the .NET framework sources I realized the problem was that the BindingContext property of the DataGridView control was null. This property represents a manager of the list of bindings for the control. If this is null then the control will use the binding context of the parent, which is usually a WinForms form. However, in this MFC application there is no WinForms form and the parent of the DataGridView control is null, which means the control does not have a bindings manager, and no bindings can be set.

The solution is to explicitly set the BindingsContext property to an existing binding context (a new object) before setting the data source.

m_dgv->BindingContext = gcnew System::Windows::Forms::BindingContext();
m_dgv->DataSource = source;

The lesson learned is that when you host a WinForms control in an MFC application some things won’t just work out of the box, if they rely on a parent form functionality. There is no such WinForms form and you might need to do additional manual initialization.