You can for a GridControl, but cannot for a GridDataBoundGrid. The GridBoundColumns which you have access to at design time for a GridDataBoundGrid, do not have a Width property associated with them.
You can derive GridBoundColumn and add a Width property to it.
Here is a sample that adds such a property, the CustomGridBoundColumn.Width, that can be used both design time and runtime as long as it is not zero. It has a Northwind datasource set in the designer, so you may have to tweak that to get it to run on your system.
It does so by listening to the Model.QueryColWidths event, and if there is a non zero width value in a column, it provides it in this event. Subscribing to the event is a little problematic in that you cannot do it in the grid''s constructor as the Model is not fully functional at that point. So, this sample uses an OnPaint override to subcribe with a flag set to to repeatedly subscribing. There may be a better place to put this, but this seems to work.
