LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–July 2012

Last year 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 all out here: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollups.

Visual Studio 2012 Release Date Announced!

The big news this month is that we announced the date we’ll be releasing Visual Studio 2012 – August 15! Read all about it on Jason’s blog: Final Build for VS 2012 - Availability and Launch Dates Ahead.

And for a good set of articles and resources on what you can expect to see in LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 see: New Features Explained – LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012

We’re super excited to get the latest version of LightSwitch into your hands!

LightSwitch HTML Client Preview

Last month we announced our roadmap in making it easy to build HTML5-based companion clients for your LightSwitch applications and released the LightSwitch HTML Client Preview for Visual Studio 2012. Since then a lot of folks have downloaded the preview bits and we’ve been having a lot of great conversations and feedback in the HTML Client Preview Forum. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to have a look. Here are some more resources to check out:

• Download: Microsoft LightSwitch HTML Client Preview for Visual Studio 2012
• Early Look at the LightSwitch HTML Client (Video)
• The LightSwitch HTML Client: An Architectural Overview
• LightSwitch HTML Client Preview Tutorial
• Creating Screens with the LightSwitch HTML Client
• Writing JavaScript Code in LightSwitch

LightSwitch on Visual Studio Toolbox Show on Channel 9

Last week while I was up in Redmond I met up with Robert Green, the host of the Visual Studio Toolbox show on Channel 9, to show off some of the new features in LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 like OData support, the new Cosmo shell, row level security, and more. I also show off some of the HTML client preview bits that were released last month in order to demonstrate building touch-centric mobile companion apps.

Watch: Visual Studio Toolbox- OData Support and HTML Clients in LightSwitch

More LightSwitch E-Books

In July we had a couple more e-books published. What’s awesome about these is that they include explanations of some of the new features in Visual Studio 2012 and best of all they’re FREE! Many thanks to the authors and publishers for these great resources.

LightSwitch Succinctlyby Jan Van der Haegen - 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.     

Your Data Everywhere: Consuming LightSwitch's OData Services from Windows Phone Apps by Alessandro Del Sole- Alessandro Del Sole, author of Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Unleashed , concludes his three-part series on the usefulness of the new support for Open Data Protocol in the latest version of LightSwitch.

Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Community Events & Conferences

Check out the list of upcoming events and sessions by the LightSwitch team. This is what our agenda looks like so far, but it’s only mid summer and we’ll probably have more to slip in as other plans materialize. For session details see my blog post from earlier this week: LightSwitch Sessions at a Variety of Upcoming Events

• St. Louis Day of .NET - August 2nd - 4th, 2012
• VSLive! Redmond - August 6th –10th, 2012
• Silicon Valley Code Camp – October 6th – 7th, 2012

MSDN Magazine Column: Leading LightSwitch

Jan van der Haegen continues his journey into the depths of LightSwitch with his regular column in the July issue:

Leading LightSwitch: Tales of Advanced LightSwitch Client Customizations 
Enjoy these tales of creating custom applications that show off the versatility and ease of use LightSwitch offers. You will also get a glimpse of how a real pro works with clients.

More Notable Content this Month

Extensions ( see all 92 of them here! ):

• Ultimate Treeview Control
• LightSwitch Application and Navigation DSL Tool for DockShell Extension
• OFX ADO.NET Data Provider

Samples ( see all 86 of them here ):

• LightSwitch HTML Preview Sample App - Store Manager
• LightSwitch HTML Preview Sample App - Project Manager
• LightSwitch HTML Preview Sample App - Accidents at Work
• Visual Studio 2012-Custom Silverlight Control to find LightSwitch OData Services

Team Articles:

• LightSwitch OData Consumption Validation in Visual Studio 2012
• LightSwitch Concurrency Enhancements in Visual Studio 2012
• Finding Your LightSwitch Produced OData Services in Visual Studio 2012
• Enhancements in Visual Studio 2012 for Sorting Data across Relationships
• Dynamically setting column names on an editable grid
• New Features Explained – LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012
• New and Improved Office Integration Pack Extension for LightSwitch

Community Articles:

• A DotNetNuke HTML Module Calling Visual Studio LightSwitch Using OData
• Application Logo (tailored on customer demand)
• Change LightSwitch Screen Display Name in Code
• CrudQRS, a pragmatic approach to CRUD and CQRS using LightSwitch
• Freeze panes in a standard LightSwitch datagrid
• Guest Post: An Introduction to LightSwitch
• Inject dynamically a column with data-aware icons in a LightSwitch datagrid
• LightSwitch Restaurant Manager (OData and Unity3D)
• Massage the LightSwitch web.config with web.config transformations
• Microsoft LightSwitch – Branching a Project in TFS
• Microsoft LightSwitch – List of Printers
• Microsoft LightSwitch – Save an Image from the Database to the File System
• Microsoft LightSwitch – Send Email from Server using SendGrid
• The Making of the LightSwitch HTML Preview Golf Clubs Sample
• Simple Extension Methods (part 1) (part 2) (part 3) (part 4)
• Understanding the decorator pattern
• Using Toastr with Visual Studio LightSwitch HTML Client (Preview)

LightSwitch Team Community Sites

Become a fan of Visual Studio LightSwitch on Facebook. Have fun and interact with us on our wall. Check out the cool stories and resources. 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)

Enjoy!