Contemplating declarative controls

I was thinking last night about all of the new declarative controls in ASP.NET v2. Things like the data source I find fascinating, because they require even less code to deal with. Putting aside the debates about the “right” way to separate your application layers, I think these are great for John Q. Programmer Jr.

So naturally this got me to thinking about the UI for POP Forums. I was excited in the last version to have a nice class library and totally separate UI. I'd like to think the entire package is pretty easy to modify and tweak in whatever manner you like. The downside is that there's still a lot of code.

Certainly I thought at various points about building my own data-driven controls that you could just drop in the page, but then I'd be where the asp.net forums were, and that is not beginning to mid-level developer friendly. That forum is a nightmare to maintain and decipher if you're not familiar with building your own controls.

So I started to think about building my own version of the data source controls, dropping them on a page and binding them to a control on the page, like a DataGrid or Repeater. This starts to sound good because it puts the “heavy lifting” of the UI in a control without tying you to a certain format. That repeater could be templated any way you want. The net effect is that there's even less code.

This is all just fanciful speculation about stuff at this point, but what do you think? If you put your architectural philosophies aside for a moment (something I have a hard time doing myself), is this kind of thing a good idea?