Is Google checkout the answer?

It looks as though it may well be. As long as you don't mind a user completing their purchase transaction away from your site.

Google's Checkout system is the most recent arrivals of the big checkout processing payment gateways. Worldpay and PayPal have lead the way for many over recent years, but with some agreesive marketing Google Checkout has made itself a force to be reckoned with.

I can't see a compelling reason to use anyone else. With great integration features, fraud checks, a powerful API, order tracking, linking to Google Analytics and savings for AdWords users it has a lot going for it!

Plus, everyone trusts Google! Seeing their badge across payment systems can be reassuring to customers that are unfamilar with your site.

My new newsletter

Starting this month, I'm going to be writing a monthly new newsletter sharing thoughts and insights in to the web.

If you are running a website or involved in creating or maintaining websites, you are the target audience. So, I'd like to invite you to sign up at http://www.bluehat.co.uk/newsletter-signup.aspx.

Exporting data to excel using VB.NET/ASP.NET

This post is going to be a little code heavy, but I do like to share a useful function every so often. Here I've picked up on the good work done at http://www.dotnetspider.com/qa/Question1653.aspx and taken it a little step further to simplify it use.

This consists three functions. The first of which you would call from your ASP.NET code if you have a DataTable that you would like to be available to users as to Save or Open in Excel:

The vb.net export code

Here's the code: Feel free to ask any questions find faults or heap praise upon it! :) Export-to-excel-from-vb.net.txt.

Read on for how to use.

Exporting to Excel from a datatable

This is the simpler one. Just call the sub DownloadDataTable pass in a DataTable and a Filename to save as.

Exporting to Excel from a datagrid

This isn't actually much more complex to use to be honest... Just call the sub DownloadDataGrid, but this time pass in a DataGrid and a Filename to save as.