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Here we will use a DataGrid which will load some customer information. Then we will pass the data to the Excel Sheet and then we will modify the data in the external application (i.e. inside the Excel sheet). You will see that, the modified data will reflect automatically to the Silverlight Application.

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.

In this post Mike Taulty discusses Silverlight 4 and the COM interop feature.

I was reading Tim’s post over here on “Silverlight 4 with COM can do anything – on Windows” which referenced Justin’s amazingly detailed post with a bunch of COM interop examples from Silverlight 4.

A Silverlight 4 beta application that has been explicitly installed as trusted by the user can create COM objects if they have a registered ProgId and if they implement IDispatch.

One of Silverlight 4's most compelling new features is support for out-of-browser applications with elevated permissions. An app running with elevated permissions can perform actions that a normal sandboxed application can not. For example, it can access the local file system, and on Windows boxes, it can interact with COM automation servers. This latter feature—also new to Silverlight 4—is the subject of this blog post.

Silverlight 4's ComAutomationFactory class provides an API for instantiating COM automation objects and for determining whether COM automation is available.

Koen Zwikstra has a nice post about hosting Silverlight outside the browser. During one of his prototyping sessions Koen stumbled upon the Silverlight COM reference that is hidden somewhere in the Silverlight documentation.

The Silverlight COM Reference describes a set of COM interfaces that enables a Silverlight plug-in to be hosted outside the browser. A custom Silverlight host may be very useful to Silverlight Spy, so I decided to build a prototype.