My First Look at Visual Studio LightSwitch

I’ve been itching to have a go with LightSwitch and the release of Beta 1 seemed a good opportunity to start the process. The first step was to install it into my existing environment. I have Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate installed on my laptop and LightSwitch should install either as a self-contained application or integrate into the Visual Studio shell, regardless of whether you have Professional, Premium or Ultimate. As keen as I was to install LightSwitch, I also didn’t want to trash my existing environment… and it didn’t. The installation is very simple. First the licence agreement and then the first installation decision:

I was curious to see what the customise option offered:

Nothing too exciting or customisable so I went for Install. There are five elements to the install, Silverlight 4, Silverlight 4 SDK, WCF RIA Services, LightSwitch Server and the LightSwitch client. This takes a few minutes to install:

Having completed the installation what do you get? Well, if you’ve got one of the Visual Studio editions already then you won’t find a new Program Group in the Start menu, and Visual Studio will appear unchanged, but you will have two new File | New | Project template options:

I created a new LightSwitch application very easily – starting with a new database

 

and adding some screens. The screenshot below is showing a master/details screen, which includes full CRUD functionality and validation, all without writing a single line of code. As a quick test I added the project to TFS source control and added a button to which I added code, but I’ll come back to these in more detail in future posts.

So, LightSwitch installed successfully and didn’t cause any issues with my existing Visual Studio Ultimate, and I was able to create a very simple, but functional, data driven application in about ten minutes.

Cheers,
Giles

Technorati Tags: LightSwitch,Visual Studio,Installation,Beta