Thank you for the fantastic and brilliant answer.  

I am linking a WinCombo to a control and depending upon whether the entry is numeric or alphabetical, I can then change the dataview.sort field.

Thus I can show the combo with the first column being the sorted one.

Hi Mike:

I have been trying to control the VisiblePosition of the columns in an Ultragrid (winforms) using an attribute on the DataSource's underlying type. The VisiblePosition doesn't seem to take - the columns result in an apparantly random order:

<snip>
foreach(var band in grid.DisplayLayout.Bands)
{
 PropertyDescriptorCollection propertyDescriptions = null;
 propertyDescriptions = ListBindingHelper.GetListItemProperties(grid.DataSource, band.Key, null);
 foreach (PropertyDescriptor propertyDescriptor in propertyDescriptions)
 {
  var attribute = propertyDescriptor.Attributes[typeof(DisplayAttribute)] as DisplayAttribute;
  DecorateGrid(propertyDescriptor, attribute, grid, band.Key);
 }
}
</snip>

where

private static void DecorateGrid(PropertyDescriptor propertyDescriptor, DisplayAttribute displayAttribute, UltraGridBase ultraGrid1, string bandKey)
{
 var name = propertyDescriptor.Name;
 ultraGrid1.DisplayLayout.Bands[bandKey].Columns[name].Header.VisiblePosition =   displayAttribute.VisiblePosition;
}

If it is still true in 2009.2 that we must set the column VisiblePosition in the order of the properties of the datasource type, due to how WinGrid uses reflection internally, then it seems to me that I need to go with the .Columns.FromKey[name].Move(#) strategy, and that my strategy will not work. Do you concur?

This property is not available for the UltraWebGrid?