I tried it out and it works fine for me. I attached a sample project here demonstrating it. Try my sample and see if it works for you. If so, then something in your project is causing it not to work.

vineas said:

and yes I've verified in the debugger that the 2nd column isn't getting the min/max width values set

How did you verify it? Did you check these properties at run-time to make sure your code is blowing away the settings by loading a Layout or something?

Also... what exactly is not working about it? What behavior are you getting?

The image below shows the problem.  The 2nd column (Display Name) is the one I want to have extend, and in the first image it's the only one that isn't fixed with a min and max width.

For verification, what I did was set a breakpoint in the layout to verify that the specific column wasn't set to with min/max width and then also an AfterSelectChange event I verified that the column still has the default values for min/max width (0).  The code that is setting this up is only slightly different than the code at the link I added before.  Not sure how will this will paste, but here it is:

        private void tableView_InitializeLayout(object sender, InitializeLayoutEventArgs e)
        {
            var searchColumn = GetSearchColumn();
            foreach (var band in e.Layout.Bands)
            {
                // first, resize all the columns in the band.
                foreach (var col in band.Columns)
                {
                    col.PerformAutoResize(PerformAutoSizeType.AllRowsInBand);
                    // now add a bit to account for bolding when selected.
                    col.Width += (int)(col.Width * 0.15);
                    // now fix the non-search columns (so the search column is the auto-fit column)
                    if ((searchColumn != null) && (searchColumn != col))
                    {
                        col.MinWidth = col.Width;
                        col.MaxWidth = col.Width;
                    }
                }
            }
 
            // finally, set the layout to extend the non-fixed column
            e.Layout.AutoFitStyle = AutoFitStyle.ExtendLastColumn;
        }