Formatting GridView Columns Dynamically

[Don Miller]

I'd like to use a programmatically bound GridView to display a dataset (or
work with a datareader) that may include everchanging numbers of database
columns, in unpredictable order, with varying datatypes. I will be letting
end-users pick which columns to display and wonder how I could format
columns (e.g. centered vs. left-aligned, short-date vs. longdate format,
numbers vs. currency, etc.) depending on the datatype.

So, I know how to do this with fixed columns with GridView but I haven't a
clue on how to format columns and their contents dynamically. It seems I
could do this a lot easier with code that generates HTML dynamically as one
long string.

Any suggestions or tips on how I can do this? Thanks.