Maybe your ultragrid never has, but the standard grid from VB has - I think this is what is meant by 'a step backwards'. I for one am amazed that there's not an easy design setting that does this. I've created a combo and the drop down is tiny, not taking up the real-estate I've laid out on the form - why? This seems counter-intuitive, as if the control has a mindset of it's own. Be that as it may, I should be able, through properties, not complex property assignments, be able to do the following on any grid: Display to header width, Disply to max width of displayed cells, display to max width of all data in cells, expand to fill available area. Why this is so complex, is a mystery to me.

Is this not a step backwards in the grand scheme of things, considering dataGrids of the past?

• iterate over the Field objects in the FieldLayout.Fields collection (the FieldLayout is passed in the FieldLayoutInitialized event args)
• if the Field.Label is a string, measure it and set the Field.Settings.LabelWidth to a value that will accomodate the string and any margins/padding 

Is there a way to get it to auto fit based on the length of  the column header?