Who told you that design time improves efficiency?
ASP.NET reads the xml designer during its rendering process and produces the response for you. So placing the code in designer and placing it in runtime is the same thing. ;)
Yes, If you want to apply gridview datasource from design time, use
SqlDataSource
or any DataSource control you want to use (there are lots of them).
For Paging use
AllowPaging = true
property.
This might give you an insight on what you can do :
GridView Paging[
^]
Cheers.
:rose: