(.NET - ASP.NET) GridView: Move Over DataGrid, There's a New Grid in Town! -- MSDN Magazine, August 2004

An article from MSDN Magazine, it explains the different views that are available in ASP.NET, the difference between Datagrid and GRid View, the programming interfaces of these controls and other details.

Despite the richness and versatility of its programming interface, the ASP.NET 1.x DataGrid control requires you to write a lot of custom code to handle common operations such as paging, sorting, editing, and deleting data. For example, while the DataGrid control can raise events when the user clicks to save or cancel changes, it doesn't offer much more than that. If you want to store changes to a persistent medium, such as a database, you have to handle the UpdateCommand event yourself, retrieve changed values, prepare a SQL command, and then proceed from there to commit the update.
The reason the DataGrid control limits the raising of events for common data operations is that it's a data source-agnostic control that can be bound to any data object that is enumerable. Implementing data operations such as update or delete would require a direct link with one particular data source. In ASP.NET 1.x, you work around this limitation by writing ADO.NET code that is specific to your application.
ASP.NET 2.0 enhances the data-binding architecture, introducing a new family of components—the data source objects—which act as a bridge between data-bound controls and ADO.NET objects. These source objects promote a slightly different programming model and provide for new features and members. For data reporting purposes, your ASP.NET 2.0 applications should use the newest grid control® the GridView. The familiar DataGrid control is still supported, but it doesn't take full advantage of the specific capabilities of data source components.
The GridView control is the successor to the DataGrid and extends it in a number of ways. First, it fully supports data source components and can automatically handle data operations, such as paging, sorting, and editing, provided its bound data source object supports these capabilities. In addition, the GridView control offers some functional improvements over the DataGrid. In particular, it supports multiple primary key fields and exposes some user interface enhancements and a new model for handling and canceling events.
The GridView comes with a pair of complementary view controls: DetailsView and FormView. By combining these controls, you can easily set up master/detail views using very little code and sometimes no code at all.