Silverlight 4 in Action (Manning, Pete Brown) – this is second book, which I read about Silverlight. First was Pro Silverlight 3 in C# (Apress, Matthew MacDonald), which helped me when I was need to very quickly know more about Silverlight after WPF. After reading Silverlight 4 in Action I think that this is best book about Silverlight. But maybe I should compare this book with Pro Business Applications with Silverlight.

I think that most of Silverlight and WPF developers know book’s author’s blog Pete Brown. Since 2009 author is Microsoft employee, since 2007 Silverlight became the main technology of development for him. You can think that Silverlight 4 in Action is second edition, because Manning has also Silverlight 2 in Action, which I didn’t read. But Silverlight 2 in Action has different authors than SL4 in Action. So talk about what’s new in Silverlight 4 in Action is no good, it is different book, written by another author. Looks like this is first book of Pete Brown, and it is written very good.

After buying paper book you will get also free e-book version (pdf), which you can read with Kindle device for example (only in album rotation). The book has about 800 pages, has 3 parts and 25 chapters.

Data export from DataGrid to Excel is very common task, and it can be solved with different ways, and chosen way depend on kind of app which you are design. If you are developing app for enterprise, and it will be installed on several computes, then you can to advance a claim (system requirements) with which your app will be work for client. Or customer will advance system requirements on which your app should work. In this case you can use COM for export (use infrastructure of Excel or OpenOffice). This approach will give you much more flexibility and give you possibility to use all features of Excel app. About this approach I’ll speak below. Other way – your app is for personal use, it can be installed on any home computer, in this case it is not good to ask user to install MS Office or OpenOffice just for using your app. In this way you can use foreign tools for export, or export to xml/html format which MS Office can read (this approach used by JIRA). But in this case will be more difficult to satisfy user tasks, like create document with landscape rotation and with defined fields for printing.

At this article I'll show you how to work with Excel object from .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 with dynamic objects and give you an approach which allow you to export data from DataGrid Silverlight and WPF controls.