The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 contains a great new ASP.NET control called ListView. When using the ListView control you have much more control over how the output HTML will look like, which I think still is the main problem with the ASP.NET controls. To learn more about the ListView control, head over to Mustafa Basguns blog and read his excellent articles on the control.

The ListView control is great when working with SharePoint (WSS3 and/or MOSS 2007) custom pages, since designing SharePoint pages which adapts into the current administration or takes advantage of all the CSS styles demands you to have pretty good control of your HTML.

To use the ListView control in SharePoint you must first of all download and install the .NET 3.5 Framework on your SharePoint servers. After that you have to edit your web.config manually to get the control to work, otherwise you will get the following error message (if you have enabled error messages, otherwise you will get Unknown Error).

Unknown server tag ‘asp:ListView’. 

Open web.config in Notepad (or what you prefer to edit it in) and paste the following under configuration/system.web/pages (after the tagMapping element)

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

controls>
    add tagPrefix="asp"         namespace="System.Web.UI.WebControls"         assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />
controls>