Databinding is EVIL

Ok, I am officially done with databinding. Today I was working with Steve on a piece of fairly trivial code, all we wanted to do was dirty checking on a few controls and provide the ability to roll back on a simple form. We poked around in the designer, and clicked here and there, then changed a couple lines of code. Overall it was very annoying, and very repetitive work because the databinding was acting flaky. Eventually we got the dirty checking on a modal form to work correctly. Before we checked in, we smoked the application real fast just to make sure everything was still working. We clicked around for a few seconds, we noticed the dirty checking was not working correctly sometimes, but we could not pin point the exact cause. By chance, we figured out the problem. If we move the modal form around on the screen after changing a value in a combo box, databinding goes nuts which breaks the dirty checking. For the most part of the day, I thought I was high because one second databinding was working, next it was blowing up.

We have been feeling the pain on databinding for a while now. I even wrote databinding on our house of pain white board, when I thought I understood databinding. We decided to stick with it because datatbinding makes things "look" so easy. It is like magic. The problem with databinding is it makes something that is very comoplex under the covers to appear stupid simple. Almost every example found in any book or on the Internet uses databinding. It seems databinding is the way to go. Databinding works fine if you have very simple UI that does nothing but display data in a primitive way. Soon as you introduce complex and rich UI, databinding makes things much harder. If databinding is so easy to use, why is Brian Noyes' book "Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0" 696 pages? There is a lot more to databinding than what meets the eye, which can lead to some serious disconnect between team members. This can often lead to dangerous situations when the wrong assumptions are made. Before you know it, you are adding hacks, so databinding would work correctly as you would expect.

The predictibility of databinding is very low because not all controls behave the same way when databinding is used. Duplication is one of the worst things you can do in any program. The concept of what value the control is displaying is duplicated. For example, if you want to retrieve data in a combo box, do you get it from the binding source or from the control it's self? The worst part of all is the value displayed in the control can be out of sync with the underlying binding source.

I hope this does not sound like I am ranting, because I am not. Maybe I am old fashioned, but manually populating the controls will be much easier and more understandable. On top of that, the code will be more testable. Less magic is a good thing.