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Visual Studio LightSwitch Books

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I recently had a couple emails asking for LightSwitch books so I thought I’d create a list of the ones I know about here. I haven’t read all of them so take a look at the reviews and decide for yourself. I do, however, know many of the authors that are active in the community and they are very knowledgeable and helpful. If I missed any book you’d recommend, please add a comment below!

I’ve ordered them in the list purely by title so not to play favorites :-) However I did tech review Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Unleashed and more recently LightSwitch Succinctly, both great reads. So here ya go!

image   Beginning Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Development By ISTVÁN NOVÁK Publication Date:June 24, 2011

Learn how LightSwitch can accelerate and simplify application development. This introductory, full-color book shows you how to quickly create, modify, and distribute information for your business with LightSwitch. Packed with simple example programs, this beginner-level resource guides you through a complete small business application using LightSwitch to demonstrate the capabilities of this exciting new tool.
image   Creating Visual Studio LightSwitch Custom Controls (Beginner to Intermediate) By Michael Washington Publication Date: July 16, 2011

LightSwitch is a powerful MVVM (Model - View- View Model) toolkit, that enables a professional developer the ability to achieve incredible productivity. LightSwitch custom controls, provide the professional developer, the tool to unleash the power of this incredible product. Creating Visual Studio LightSwitch Custom Controls (Beginner to Intermediate), will walk you through creating LightSwitch custom controls, even if you are a total beginner and have not created a Silverlight control before.
image   Developing Real-world Applications with LightSwitch By Gill Cleeren Publication Date: October 12, 2011 This ebook provides a great introduction to LightSwitch, and walks you through the various parts of LightSwitch that a developer needs to know.
image   LightSwitch Succinctly (FREE) by Jan Van der Haegen Publication Date: July, 2012 The author of this e-book, Jan Van der Haegen, is a self-described green geek who writes a monthly LightSwitch column for MSDN magazine. In LightSwitch Succinctly, he provides a quick tour of the different parts of the LightSwitch development environment so that you can judge whether Visual Studio LightSwitch would be an ideal tool to add to your belt.
image   Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Business Application Development by Jayaram Krishnaswamy Publication Date: September 21, 2011

This book is for developers who are beginning to use Visual Studio LightSwitch. Small business houses should be able get a jump start on using LightSwitch. The book does not assume prior knowledge of Visual Studio LightSwitch but exposure to SQL Server, Silverlight, and Microsoft IDEs such as Visual Studio (any version) will be of great help.
image   Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Unleashed- (Download chapter 3 for free here) By Alessandro Del Sole Publication Date: March 5, 2012

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch represents a breakthrough in business application development for Windows clients, the Web, and the cloud. Using this new tool, you can build powerful data-centric applications with far less code than ever before. Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Unleashed is the first comprehensive, start-to-finish guide to this powerful new tool. Written by longtime Visual Basic expert and Microsoft MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this book covers everything Microsoft developers need to know to make the most of LightSwitch–from the absolute basics to the most advanced enterprise techniques.
image   OData And Visual Studio LightSwitch Using ASP.NET / Windows Phone / jQuery / datajs / Knockout By Michael Washington Publication Date: June 2, 2012

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a development tool that provides the easiest and fastest way to create ‘forms over data, line of business applications’. It allows you to build applications for the desktop and the cloud. It does this by allowing you to quickly and easily define and connect to your data, program your security and business rules, and expose this via OData to practically any ‘client’ such as mobile devices and web pages. This book will show you how to publish and consume OData services. A standard order entry LightSwitch application is used to demonstrate real world scenarios where you will need to expose your application to web pages, tablets, and other mobile devices. Technologies covered include jQuery Mobile, Windows Phone, datajs and Knockout.
image   Pro Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 Development By Tim Leung & Yann Duran Publication Date: March 26, 2012

For serious developers building, enhancing and deploying advanced business applications using LightSwitch, Pro Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 Development is the guide for going beyond the "click-and-you're-done" interface, while still maintaining the elegance and convenience of rapid application development.
image   SharePoint Apps with LightSwitch By Paul Ferrill Publication Date: April 13, 2012

Build custom business applications for SharePoint with Visual Studio LightSwitch—including intuitive apps that don’t require a single line of code. This example-driven guide takes non-programmers step-by-step through the process of creating simple apps and utilities, and shows programmers familiar with C# or Visual Basic how to build customized applications with more functionality.
   

And don’t forget, another great place for learning resources like videos, samples and more is the LightSwitch Developer Center.

Enjoy!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2012
    Thank you so much..... my Teacher  really you are Sharing the goodness

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2012
    Do you have any advice on which of these books might cover the "testing" aspects of LightSwitch?  I am struggling a little with the problem of how to integrate LightSwitch development into a TDD and Continuous Integration methodology.  Thanks for the help and the great post!!

  • Anonymous
    September 22, 2012
    @Walt - LightSwitch doesn't really lend itself well to unit testing, so I can only share with you what I do. Any code that I want to be able to unit test, I pull out into modules (static classes). Then I add a test project to the solution, & add links to those classes in the test project.  Then I modify my LS entities to call the code from the modules, instead of having the code embedded in the entity itself. That way I'm not trying to unit test LS itself, nor the entities that it creates, just testing business rules etc really. And this way I can always choose to reuse the code in another LS application as well, without having to copy/paste code all the time. I hope that helps.

  • Anonymous
    September 24, 2012
    Thanks for the advice, Yann.  I will give that technique a try.