With the increasing popularity and adoption of the Force.com platform, there’s a huge growth in custom Visualforce pages, in particular pages which require interaction with multiple objects. One requirement that comes up regularly is how to display picklist values from an object when the page is using a custom controller.

In order to achieve this, we have to look at the very powerful and useful Dynamic Apex Describe Information capabilities.  These capabilities allow us to interrogate a field or sObject, and describe their characteristics. In our requirement above, we want to describe the fields on an object, in particular, a picklist field to determine its list of values.

Read Complete Article by Quinton Wall @ Salesforce Blog