<p>I'm coming from a Rails background and doing some work on a ASP.NET project (not ASP MVC). Newbie question: what's the easiest way to make a custom editor for a table of records?</p>

<p>For example: I have a bunch of data rows and want to change the "category" field on each -- maybe a dropdown, maybe a link, maybe the user types it in.</p>

<p>In Rails, I'd iterate over the rows to build a table, and would have a form for each row. The form would have an input box or dropdown, and submit the data to a controller like "/item/edit/15?category=foo" where 15 was the itemID and the new category was "foo".</p>

<p>I'm new to the ASP.NET model and am not sure of the "right" way to do this -- just the simplest way to get back the new data &amp; save it off. Would I make a custom control and append it to each row? Any help appreciated.</p>

There are a few controls that will do this for you, with varying levels of complexity depending on their relative flexibility.
The traditional way to do this would be the DataGrid control, which gives you a table layout. If you want something with more flexibility in appearance, the DataList and ListView controls also have built-in support for editing, inserting or deleting fields as well.
Check out
Matt Berseth's blog
for some excellent examples of asp.net controls in action.