I'm aware that the ES collection exposes a Sort property. What I'd like to determine is if there is a clean, simple and non-copy and paste web page-level code way to bridge the ES collection with an MS GridView for the purpose of column sorting.

I realize that GridView sorting can be implemented in at least a couple of ways:

1. Through a GridView, a datasource that exposes an internal sorting mechanism (e.g. via DataView or ES collection) and some page-level code to handle the sort expression/direction translation and persistence.
2. Through a datasource that exposes an internal sorting mechanism (e.g. via DataView or ES collection) and an asp.net binding control (e.g. SqlDataSource, ObjectDataSource)
3. Extend the GridView control to support sort expression/direction translation and persistence internally.
4. Implement a binding control similar to the MS datasource controls.
5. Extend the page class to handle the sort expression/direction translation and persistence.

I took a look at your ES site template code grid column sorting and basically option 5 is used. For various reasons, I prefer not to use option 1, 2 or 5 and option 3 or 4 are some work. I seem to remember hearing about the possiblity that the current? release of ES was to include a databinidng control that might be similar to MS ObjectDataSource; but without all the limitations. Am I completely wrong?  Would such a control help in cleanly enabling sorting against an asp.net GridView?