At our product we have a client Silverlight part and server-code part, which contains a lot of WCF methods. We don’t use ASP.NET Compatible mode, because we want to leave an opportunity to deploy server part to server without web-server role (without IIS). Really, I don’t know why we chose this way, because all of our installations at current moment are on IIS. But we have what we have, so we haven’t ASP.NET Compatible mode, and as an expected result we can’t get HttpContext.Current instance at server WCF methods. One of WCF Service is a RESTful service, which at his methods returns report files, so it can handle GET-queries from browsers.

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.

Recently Konstantin Kishinsky (Microsoft Russia) presented in his blog Deep Zoom Composer 1.0 (in russian), which everyone can download from Microsoft site. What is it and how it works - you can find in user guide.

And now i want to show you how we can use it in production.