The other day at work I was binding a list of items to a DataList. Usually with the data bound controls such as a GridView you can either use the BoundField column or you can style your own columns using TemplateFields. In this case I had a user control inside of the item template of the DataList and needed to set a property on the control to the item being bound. Since I started out using Asp.Net 2.0 the syntax I use to bind to properties on objects is either the Eval or Bind tags. These tags are great when you need to bind to an individual property on the object but not so good when you need to bind to the object itself. Now I could have just overrode the RowDatabound event and did this is the code behind but I wanted to do it in the markup since it seemed cleaner.

I wasn’t really sure what to search for but after a little effort I found Container.DataItem. From what I understand this is what was used in 1.1 to bind to the properties of an object. I was able to bind the property of the user control in the markup and go from there.