LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup– December 2011
Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and enjoyed some well-deserved time off. I sure did! Now that I’m back in the office I’m a few days overdue for this post so here ya go! A few months ago I started posting a rollup of interesting community happenings, content, samples and extensions popping up around Visual Studio LightSwitch. If you missed those rollups you can check them out here:
- LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–September 2011
- LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–October 2011
- LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–November 2011
Usually December is a pretty slow month all around, but there were still a lot of awesome things around LightSwitch, especially the number of community articles this month! Check them out…
“LightSwitch Star” Contest
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Do you have what it takes to be a LightSwitch Star? Show us your coolest, most productive, LightSwitch business application and you could win a Laptop and other great prizes!
In November The Code Project launched the “LightSwitch Star” contest. You just answer some questions and email them a screenshot or two. They’re looking for apps that show off the most productivity in a business as well as apps that use extensions in a unique, innovative way. Prizes are given away each month (see here for more details on prizes). In early December they announced theNovember winners and today they announced the December winners in each category:
| Most Efficient Business Application | Most Ground-breaking Business Application |
| November | November |
| 1st prize: Security Central 2nd prize: PTA LightSwitch | 1st prize: Church+ 2nd prize: Engineering App |
| December | December |
| 1st prize: Patient Tracker 2nd prize: Instant Assets | 1st prize: Health and Safety Management System 2nd prize: Orion |
Congrats to all! Can’t wait to see what people submit in January. There were some really cool applications submitted in December. Here’s a breakdown of what was submitted last month (see all 23 apps that have been submitted so far here). Make sure to vote for your favorite ones, grand prize is a laptop!
7 More Production Apps…
- Instant Assets - The one stop shop for all your asset, equipment and facilities management needs
- Patient Tracker - used to interface to a SharePoint list (used as the dataset) to provide timestamp and delay code inputs to the SharePoint list.
- PeopleTrac – People Management for Not-For-Profit Organizations - Demonstrates several LightSwitch capabilities including WCF-RIA services, Native SQL, Name and Addres merge purge
- The Health and Safety Management System - The Health and Safety Management System is an application that is used to help organizations better manage and mitigate health and safety statistics and KPIs.
- Orion - A mini-CRM that helps with POS records, service request, field technicians workload, inventory, inventory tracking, fuel management and reports.
- Search SSRS Subscriptions – Manages subscriptions to SQL Server Reporting Services
- WindowsDevNews.com: A Visual Studio LightSwitch Application – WindowsDevNews.com site uses Visual Studio LightSwitch for it's back-end
3 More Tutorials/Samples/Videos…
- An Advanced Visual Studio LightSwitch Application
- Health and Safety Management System (Tutorial)
- YouTube Video - Using LightSwitch with MySQL
ComponentOne Scheduler for LightSwitch Released
ComponentOne released another LightSwitch extension last month in addition to the OLAP Control. This ready-to-use LightSwitch screen gives you a complete Outlook-style scheduling application! Check it out:
Notable Content this Month
Here’s some more of the fun things the team and community released in December.
Extensions released in December (see all 71 of them here!):
- Background Group Layout Extension
- ComponentOne Scheduler for LightSwitch
- Extended Text Box Extension
- Image Button Extension
- Light Brown Theme
- Spursoft Context Menu Commands
Build your own extensions by visiting the LightSwitch Extensibility page on the LightSwitch Developer Center.
Team Articles:
In December I kicked off a series aimed at beginner developers just getting started with LightSwitch and was featured in the MSDN Flash Newsletter. This brought A LOT of traffic to my blog – in fact, it is at an all-time high since the month of December! WOW! This series is popular!
- Part 0: Getting Started Resources
- Part 1: What’s in a Table? Describing Your Data
- Part 2: Feel the Love. Defining Data Relationships
- Part 3: Screen Templates, Which One Do I Choose?
- Part 4: Too much information! Sorting and Filtering Data with Queries
- Part 5: May I? Controlling Access with User Permissions
- Part 6: I Feel Pretty! Customizing the "Look and Feel" with Themes
Matt Thalman also wrote the following article that address a top request in the LightSwitch Forums:
Creating a Custom Login Page for a LightSwitch Application
Community Articles:
- A Groundbreaking Control - ComponentOne Scheduler LightSwitch Extension
- Extending LightSwitch TextBox : Walk-Through
- Help Desk: An Advanced Visual Studio LightSwitch Application
- Levels of Validation and Filtering on User Membership
- LightSwitch: increasing the client-side timeout in code (VB)
- LightSwitch and the MEF story
- Metadata driven development, the Holy Grail of software development
- Microsoft LightSwitch – Championing the Citizen Developer
- Microsoft LightSwitch – Code Project LightSwitch Star Contest
- Microsoft LightSwitch – Maintaining a Primary Child Entity
- Microsoft LightSwitch – Multi Select Checklist
- Microsoft LightSwitch – Simple but Effective Application Defaults
- The LightSwitch JetPack Theme
- Using the ComponentOne FlexGrid Control in Visual Studio LightSwitch
- Using the Infragistics Reporting with OData In Visual Studio LightSwitch
- WindowsDevNews.com: A Visual Studio LightSwitch Application
Samples (see all of them here):
- Background Group Layout Extension - Source Code
- Extended Text Box Extension - Source Code
- How to Open Properties Window for Default Project with Macro
- LightSwitch Image Button Extension – Walkthrough
LightSwitch Team Community Sites
The Visual Studio LightSwitch Facebook Page has been increasing in activity thanks to you all. Become a fan! Have fun and interact with us on our wall. Check out the cool stories and resources.
Also here are some other places you can find the LightSwitch team:
LightSwitch MSDN Forums
LightSwitch Developer Center
LightSwitch Team Blog
LightSwitch on Twitter (@VSLightSwitch, #VisualStudio #LightSwitch)
Join Us!
The community has been using the hash tag #LightSwitch on twitter when posting stuff so it’s easier for me to catch it (although this is a common English word so you may end up with a few weird ones ;-)). Join the conversation! And if I missed anything please add a comment to the bottom of this post and let us know!
Enjoy!