On his new web diary, Silvano Coriani has published an interesting message: in a new software era where the user interface is growing as importance, why the old GRID is always so requested?
I agree that with the latest technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation the UI must be revisited and the we've to be ready for a new way to obtain informations from a software and to interact with data, but a new visual experience is not all for a software.
A software, expecially in the business world, must be productive! The grid could be an old concept (at least it's 20 years old) but I think that this is the most productive control I've ever used on a business software.
If you think to a software that is built in order to manage informations, having such a grid that can permits you to have all the informations you want under your eyes, filter them, order them and immediately work on the represented data, this is unvaluable for a user... Obviously, the grid concept must be improved and adapt to the new UI experience (and I think this is why the biggest request to the WPF Team is actually to have a new DataGrid despite WPF helps to do so with the ListView control for example), but thinking now to a control more productive that the "old" grid view, is a bit strange for me...