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Rapid Business Application Development with Visual Studio LightSwitch

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logo This morning Jason Zander announced an exciting new product that the Visual Studio BizApps team here at Microsoft has been building – Visual Studio LightSwitch!

I am so excited to be able to finally talk about this product! It’s great to be part of a team that works on so many Visual Studio tools (like our Office and SharePoint tools) but LightSwitch is definitely near and dear to my heart because of the types of applications you build with it – data-centric business applications. In the 15 years prior to joining Microsoft, I’ve built a variety of business applications and application frameworks so I’m really excited to be working with this part of our team and ramping up on LightSwitch. I'll definitely be helping with articles, How Do I videos and team interviews as we journey through the Beta to ship cycle.

LightSwitch makes it easy to create data-centric applications for the desktop and the cloud. You can connect to multiple data sources (i.e. SQL, SharePoint, Azure, WCF RIA Services, etc.) to create feature-rich Silverlight applications on a solid .NET architecture without having to know the depths of Entity Framework or Silverlight or n-tier design. The LightSwitch application framework handles this for you. It also provides so many features that all business applications have in common right out of the box - like an entire application shell, data validations and search. There are also many screen and control templates to choose from as well as a whole set of partners building additional controls, themes, templates, and plug-ins that we will make available right from the LightSwitch development environment via Visual Studio Gallery.

The idea is you just concentrate on defining entities and screens and the business rules and workflows. The only code you write is the code only you could write – code related to your business domain. And you can use either VB or C# to do that.

I’m just learning all about this myself but it will sure be a fun ride and I’m excited to jump into it and help you all learn too along the way. The Beta 1 will be available on August 23rd from the LightSwitch Developer Center and we’ll have a lot more tutorials & walkthroughs for you then.

For now check out some of our online resources we launched today and stay tuned to these channels for more info. We’ll be rolling out more videos on the Developer Center each week:

Also check out some of the buzz from today’s announcement:

Enjoy!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2010
    Go Beth Go!   this should be a fun ride...do i need to wear a helmet?

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2010
    LOL! Maybe I need one too! ;-)

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2010
    WOW!!! We're all eagerly waiting for it, does LightSwitch has an official blog where I can subscribe to its feeds?

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2010
    Beth, Isn't this just another Framework Builder like all the others that sits on top of .Net?

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2010
    @Shimmy - I mention some important links at the end of the post including the official team blog: blogs.msdn.com/lightswitch @Bernard - Not just a framework, it's an entire development environment. Check out the Beta when it's released on August 23rd on the dev center: http://msdn.com/lightswitch

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2010
    this looks just plain neat! I don't often look forward to betas, but I'm counting the days.

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2010
    what can i say? anything that make programming easy is worth trying, i can't wait for the beta! i love your tutorials beth, they  are always spot-on, keep it up. Lots of matooke love

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2010
    Lady You do a great job. Thank you for your tutorials and for keeping us updated

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2011
    Well, I'm just catching up on your old blog posts to help familiarize myself with LightSwitch, but I must say - I'm quite impressed! This is a huge development for Microsoft...and I look forward to the final product. :)

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2011
    I am having trouble with an error "method not found Microsoft.Data.Sql...".  There is a lot of "rambling" on the subject, but most pertains to deleting the files from the SqlExpressData location.  I have already done that and it got rid of the first error I was getting saying that it couldn't connect to Sqlexpress.  I can't seem to get rid of this second error. I have lightswitch installed successfully on an older machine, but I am connecting to a SQL Azure db and it is so SLOW that I can't effectively use it (sometimes it takes 2 minutes to load a table with 100 records into a grid.)  I use this same database with Silverlight4 RIA services and odata on WP7 and it is lightning fast. I need to get this newer/faster machine running and need your help with this method reference error. I have tried to add this file as a reference manually, but it is hard to tell which LS gened project to add it to. Thanks,