Introducing Visual Studio LightSwitch
I am pleased to announce a new product in the Visual Studio family - Visual Studio LightSwitch.
LightSwitch is the simplest way to build business applications for the cloud and the desktop.
Today, businesses move at the speed of light even as people balance the responsibility of more than one role within their organizations. As this shift becomes more pronounced, it's become clear that a broader set of developers is building business applications and really expects a much simpler way to quickly accomplish their goals... and with this observation, a light went on and LightSwitch was born.
LightSwitch provides a variety of pre-built templates and tools to build business applications that target Windows Client or Windows Azure using as much or as little code as you want to write. With LightSwitch, there is now a tool that better enables business domain experts to easily build professional-quality line-of-business applications without focusing on writing code. This is critical because these business applications - which may be built out of a short-term need - often need to be extended and IT supported.
You can quickly build line-of-business applications beginning with only one decision - Visual Basic or C#.
You can build forms from existing templates and populate them with data from data sources including SQL Server, SQL Azure, SharePoint, and others. There is integrated support for working with Microsoft Office for tasks such as exporting data to Excel without having to write code. Within minutes you can have a basic business application created and ready to deploy, leveraging disparate data sources and Office tools. While developing your application, you can modify the application as it runs.
LightSwitch creates Silverlight applications that can run in the browser, out-of-the-browser, or in the cloud. When your application grows, you can use Visual Studio 2010 Professional, Premium or Ultimate to extend and customize it further.
In the coming months, we'll provide more details about LightSwitch.
We will be making the first beta of LightSwitch available broadly on August 23rd. To learn more about LightSwitch, visit the LightSwitch page or read Jason Zander's post on LightSwitch.
Namaste!
Comments
Anonymous
August 03, 2010
Hi, the links are broken at the end of your post. Looks interesting, I'll keep checking back.Anonymous
August 03, 2010
I agree there are many exciting features vs2010 introduced especially for dot net. But there are nearly no improvements for VC++ 2010, even worse there exist some very silly issues in ATL, please have a look at below links, which are very basic ATL functionalities but with unreasonable bugs. social.msdn.microsoft.com/.../0d8f34ac-5a4c-416f-864a-c747c68e2d7f social.msdn.microsoft.com/.../42fb42f7-6976-4cd1-a946-833c8eca02bc Has MS forgotten native C++ developers?Anonymous
August 03, 2010
please google 0d8f34ac-5a4c-416f-864a-c747c68e2d7f and 42fb42f7-6976-4cd1-a946-833c8eca02bc if you want to know how silly the ATL bug are.Anonymous
August 03, 2010
Rob M; check at www.microsoft.com/lightswitch. The information is now live, including an introductory video which takes you on a tour of what Visual Studio Lightswitch can do.Anonymous
August 03, 2010
Hi Rob M, The links are live now. Thanks for the catch. -somasegarAnonymous
August 03, 2010
Looks like native C++ is history! C# has taken over! hehe :)Anonymous
August 03, 2010
Native developers, don't fret- we are planning new features and significant tooling enhancements especially for C++ developers in the next release of Visual Studio. Polita Paulus MicrosoftAnonymous
August 03, 2010
As I said on JZ's blog, when you try and abstract things like this, we're just going to end up having to learn a whole new set of stuff in order to plug into this in order to extend it and work around the limitations of the abstraction framework. Once interest dies down, it's destined to end up on the scrap heap like similar ideas such as the now defunct PopFly. I think the real frustration we're seeing lately (even just in the last few comments here) is that there are loads of existing MS technologies that are in daily use in the real world, that are desperately in need of attention. There are literally thousands of of dev requests on Connect for areas that need to be addressed, yet resources are being spent on questionable new projects like this. On a more positive note, I really appreciate the last few announcements (VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools with the fantastic new Solution Explorer, SQL CE 4, IIS Express etc.) which are all great news for developers, but I'm afraid can't say I'm too enthusiastic about LightSwitch.Anonymous
August 03, 2010
Thank you, Paulus! i hope i will be happy with next release of VC++ 201X.Anonymous
August 03, 2010
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August 03, 2010
This reminds me of a LOB framework that Microsoft developed about 2 years ago. There was a blog here on MSDN with screenshots with the same light blue color. Does anyone remember the name?Anonymous
August 04, 2010
It seems great for building administrative back-ends, it could reduce a lot of time on a project, allowing the development to focus on the core architectural features and less time on the repetitive administrative features.Anonymous
August 04, 2010
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August 04, 2010
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August 05, 2010
I'm very interested to learn more. I've been disappointed with some community reaction. I've written about that on my blog at http://www.tsjensen.com/blog if you care to read it. I look forward to getting my hands on the beta.Anonymous
August 05, 2010
Thanks Tyler. I did read your blog post on this. You should be able to get access to the beta on the 23rd of this month. Would love to hear your feedback after you have had a chance to play around with the beta. -somasegarAnonymous
August 06, 2010
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August 07, 2010
Such kind of projects only makes you managers happy. But have you thought what developers want? Developers need a development platform instead of an application like this. Please VS team focus on what developers really needAnonymous
August 10, 2010
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August 12, 2010
Looks promising. I can think of various scenario where this will be a perfect fit. Look forward to getting hands on beta. By the way, is silverlight the only UI option or is pure HTML output a possibility? Don't see how this will run on iOS or Android devices unless Silverlight shows up there.Anonymous
August 13, 2010
Kumar, LightSwitch will create only Silverlight applications for the first version. We are considering supporting other UI platforms, such as HTML, for future versions, but right now we’re concentrating on getting the first version ready for customers. Polita Paulus MicrosoftAnonymous
August 17, 2010
Hi Soma, i have no other way than to ask you to help triage such a silly vc++10 bug since no feeadback at all after nearly one month passed, could you please have you members have a look at this critial issue? https: // connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/578130/vs2010-bug-unresolved-external-symbol-proxyfileinfo#tabs VS2010 bug?? unresolved external symbol ###_ProxyFileInfo Many thanks, song.min@live.comAnonymous
August 23, 2010
LightSwitch Beta1 is now available at msdn.microsoft.com/.../default.aspx. Jason Zander has an amazing LightSwitch app building walkthrough here: blogs.msdn.com/.../lightswitch-beta1-now-available-building-your-first-app.aspx. Polita Paulus Microsoft