DECLARE @ConcatenatedValues NVARCHAR (MAX)
SELECT @ConcatenatedValues = COALESCE(@ConcatenatedValues + ‘;’, ”) + ColumnFromTable
FROM Table

It’s that simple.

The trick is to dynamically add styles, that Excel recognizes, to the Response object.  When Excel is opening the HTML from the DataGrid and sees the styles it will set the formatting for you.  To see a list of available styles refer to this link

After you call DataBind() on your DataGrid you can call the following function.

private void ExportGrid(string fileName)
{
Response.Clear();
Response.Buffer = true;
Response.Charset = “”;
Response.AddHeader(“content-disposition”, “attachment; filename=” + fileName);
Response.ContentType = “application/vnd.ms-excel”;
StringWriter sw = new System.IO.StringWriter();
HtmlTextWriter htw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw);
DataTable dt = (DataTable)DataGrid1.DataSource; 

	// here, we loop through each row and then each cell and check the data type.  We then add the appropriate class              	 	

	foreach (DataGridItem itm in DataGrid1.Items)              	

	{                              		

		for (int i = 0; i < itm.Cells.Count; i++)                 		

		{                      			

			TableCell tc = itm.Cells[i];                      			

			switch (dt.Columns[i].DataType.ToString().ToLower())                     			

			{                          				

				case “system.string”:                              					

					tc.Attributes.Add(“class”, “text”);                              					

					break;       				

				case “system.datetime”:                              					

					tc.Attributes.Add(“class”, “dt”);                             					

					break;                           				

				case “system.decimal”:                              					

					tc.Attributes.Add(“class”, “num”);                              					

					break;                          				

				default:                              					

					break;                     			

			}                 		

		}            	

	}             

	DataGrid1.RenderControl(htw);              	

	StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();              	

	sb.Append(@”<style> ”);              	

	sb.Append(@” .text { mso-number-format:\@; } ”);              	

	sb.Append(@” .num { mso-number-format:0\.00; } ”);              	

	sb.Append(@” .dt { mso-number-format: ’Short Date’; } ”);              	

	sb.Append(@”</style>”);                

	Response.Write(sb.ToString());  // write the styles to the Response           	

	Response.Write(sw.ToString());             	

	Response.Flush();              	

	Response.End();         

}

1. Admit when you are wrong: There is no more sure sign of weakness in a leader than one who cannot admit when they are wrong.  It is a sign of cowardice and foolishness.  Ironically, they believe it is a sign of power and authority; however, since others know they are wrong it ends up proving that they are egotistical and cowardice.  It is very easy to admit when you are wrong.  No one expects you to be perfect and most people prefer a leader who is honest and humble with them so admitting when you are wrong is the first step to being an effective leader.  My previous “leader” taught me this lesson very well by being the opposite of what he should have been.  See here.
2. Do not lie: One would think this would be obvious but it has amazed me at how many leaders believe lying is good.  There is a difference between not telling the complete story and lying.  It is not always necessary to share every piece of information with employees as sometimes the information may be confidential but there should never be a reason to lie.  My previous “leader” called a company meeting to chew everyone out because a database had been lost.  The network services team had not been doing the backups they were supposed to be doing and the sandbox server crashed.  My “leader” tried to make us all feel bad for screwing up by telling us that we had lost $1200 per person of profit sharing because we would have to give money back to the customer.  To make a long story short it turns out we found an old backup of the database which was exactly what we needed and even funnier was that the backup had been emailed months ago to our “leader” per his request and he had forgotten.  Not only did he never apologize but he never paid out the profit sharing since he did not now have to pay back the customer.  He never had any intention of paying us that profit sharing, he just wanted us to feel bad.  Don’t lie.  Eventually it will bite you.
3. Provide clear vision of direction: The main function of a leader is to “lead”.  Leaders need to let people know where they are going and then to lead them there.  At my previous job we never had clear direction of where we were going.  We simply worked on project after project and none of them related to each other in any way so we always felt like we were bouncing around.  Leaders need to lead.  Employees will be much more effective if they understand what they are working towards.
4. Communicate effectively: See a recent Dilbert strip.  My previous “leader” was terrible at this which is why it has made my top 5 list.  We could rarely understand what he wanted and were always confused by his emails since he very often contradicted himself in the email.  Unlike the Dilbert strip, my previous “leader” was very technical and should have been able to communicate with us well.  He was full of fancy wording but never really said anything.  Often I would send an email that required a one word or one sentence response and would get several paragraphs of “marketing” material back.  In fact, I was supposed to have been given a raise and had not yet so I asked him in email when I would and his response was “we are making minimal adjustments among managers to create additional parity.”  When I asked him to explain he quoted himself and said he had already answered me.  That was an answer?  Wow.  Turns out the answer was yes, I was getting a raise and it would be in the next paycheck but it took many paragraphs and several back and forth emails to finally get to that simple solution.  Too funny.  Even funnier was that he often lectured our team on needing to do a better job of communicating.
5. Be a team player: You win as a team and you lose as a team.  A former “leader” of mine claimed that “When we win, I give you all credit and when we lose I take all of the blame.”  That is a great statement; however, in this case it was not true.  Years ago when I worked in the grocery business I had the best manager I have ever seen.  He worked right along side of us and truly lead by example.  He was a team player and because of that he was greatly respected.

These 5 steps are easy to implement and should be done.  Effective leaders will self-assess from time to time and make adjustments as necessary.

For example, suppose you have a grid view and you are grouping by a certain column and you need each group to total 100% in one of its columns.  (Note: I am not going into detail of which grid view control you use.)  You could do these 2 lines of code:

1. $(”tr[type=TotalRow]:contains(’100.00%’)”).addClass(”Valid”);
2. $(”tr[type=TotalRow]:not(:contains(’100.00%’))”).addClass(”Invalid”);

• $(”tr[type=TotalRow] - This will select all table rows that have an attribute named type which has a value of TotalRow.
• :contains(’100.00%’)”) - This will further filter the list of table rows returned by ensuring that they have the text ‘100.00%’ in them.
• .addClass(”Valid”); - This adds a CSS class of name ‘Valid’ to every table row that met the criteria.  In this case, every table row that has an attribute named type and a value of TotalRow as well as having the text 100.00% will have the ‘Valid’ CSS class applied to it.

The second line of code simply uses the not function so that it finds any table row that IS of type TotalRow and that does NOT have 100.00% in the row somewhere and then adds a CSS class named Invalid.

Pretty simple and easy to do.

I think humor really is the “best medicine” for situations like this.  We cannot expect anyone to be perfect but it should not be too hard to admit when you are wrong.  Pride gets in the way but it is even more damaging when you do not admit it because it is clear to everyone else that you are wrong and yet you continue to insist you are right.  At that point, you just look like a fool.

When I first started my previous job there were just 5 of us.  Myself and another developer would often get emails from the boss that would not make any sense or that contradicted himself within the same email.  I used to ask what we were supposed to do and the other developer would just shrug it off.  He was used to nonsense emails from the boss.

2 pieces of advice:

1. When you are wrong, just admit it.  It is not that hard to do.
2. If you have to deal with people like this especially if it is your boss I suggest you find humor in it or else you may lose your mind.

I then found out my boss had lied and that I would not have ownership, which is a different story altogether; however, when I found out the details of the ownership I was no longer upset about not getting ownership, I was only upset for ever taking the job.

The deal was you had to pay money to get the ownership.  How is that an employee benefit?  It is not.  I can own a part of any publicly traded company in the world including Microsoft, HP, IBM, etc., if I pay money.  That is referred to as buying stocks.

So, employee ownership can be a great benefit but not when you have to pay for it.   My previous job had supposed “employee benefits” but at the end of the day none of them were designed to benefit the employee.

It runs on top of Eclipse so it will not work with Visual Studio but it would be great if Microsoft created a feature similar to this in the next version of Visual Studio.

I wonder how well it works with larger and more complex functions.  Either way, I believe this is a great step towards improving developer efficiency.