I have a VB.NET app which pulls some data out of an Excel file and puts it into XML.

Originally, I read from the Excel file using an OleDB connection but then when we deployed the app to the test server, it gave an error saying that some Jet database components needed to be registered on the server to read from Excel and we're not allowed to register those on the server.

Then, I rewrote it using the Microsoft.Office.Interop Excel components. Apparently, however, that needs to have Excel registered on the server in order to work and we can't install that either.

Is there another way to read data from Excel using VB.NET which doesn't require anything but the .NET Framework on the server the app is running from? It's just a few simple rows of data with no formulas or macros or anything and I just want to grab the data out. It seems to me that this shouldn't be all that complex.