vb.net best practice?

[uid0]

I've written a vb.net winforms app which takes result sets from sql server, displays them in a datagrid and dumps them to excel.

As a quick'n'dirty hack, I set the display properties by using the data type, so floating point columns are displayed with no decimal places, decimal columns 2 d.p.

I'd like to replace this hack with something more flexible, so I was wondering if there was a normal way to transfer this kind of metadata.

I could use part of the column name and then strip it off, but that seems like another dirty hack, or I could use another table or a set of output parameters.

Does anyone have any advice?

Thanks