Export GridView to Excel

I thought this sounded like a pretty standard requirement so I figured there would be a nice snippet on msdn or in an msdn publication describing the official Microsoft solution. I couldn’t find that, or any other approach that I was happy with. I ran across a few sites that looked promising, but didn’t quite meet my requirements – I had to either override a page level method and do nothing or else turn off event validation. It also generally appeared that the people using these solutions were also running into a variety of issues with grids that allow sorting and paging - all of the grids I am working with allow both.