One thing thats midly annoying to me about the new gridview control is that it doesn't display the header row when there is no data. I would like to just have the header displayed like the original table with a single row saying something like "No records found". The grid has a property for emptydata text which doesn't look that great in my opinion. I have seen some people use the <> property to create a new table in there which isn't the cleanest solution. One way to get the gridview to display how you want is to create a custom control that inherts from gidview. Then you can override the CreateChildControls method to create a the gridview with the all the headers and a blank row with one cell and a text message. Here's how to do it: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Text; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; public class EmptyGridView : GridView { #region Properties /// /// Enabl