Asynchronous development is both a difficult and a rewarding way to develop applications that have responsive user-interfaces. It can be a headache because objects on different threads cannot contact each other. Instead, data must be marshaled from one thread to the other. In C#, this is usually accomplished by invoking the object.

In this article I will explain how to asynchronously execute a method on a separate thread, raise events from that thread and update a user’s GUI, and return the results of that operation. Although this operation can be easily duplicated using a BackgroundWorker object, understanding the process can help you design objects that provide their own asynchronous support. In addition, asynchronous invocation of methods can be performed multiple times at once, unlike a BackgroundWorker.

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Drilldown ASP.NET Databound Gridview
A drilldown gridview is handy to display information that contains child data while at the same time allowing the data to be collapsed to save space. For as common as the request might seem, I was surprised by the lack of documentation and tutorials on the subject.

Background:
I was looking to create a table listing of products, each product row could optionally contain a child row that could have varying attributes under different stores (i.e. Price, description, promotion). This made a drilldown gridview the perfect choice.

In my example I am using a databound gridview thus an assumption is being made that you have already bound the data.

We must get our hands on the data while it is being bound, therefore a most of the labor will happen in the GridView1_RowDataBound method. This method will be called each time a row is bound to our gridview giving us access to the data as it is being set.

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