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LightSwitch Finds the Balance

I've written about Visual Studio LightSwitch several times in this blog and in my Redmond Review column, including this month's piece, LightSwitch: The Answer to the Right Question. All throughout, I've been pretty clear in my support of the product. 

A little over two weeks ago LightSwitch shipped, and I think it's off to a very good start. To help it along, I wrote a series of five whitepapers on LightSwitch for the product team, and they were just published by Microsoft. You can find them all by looking around the product's site, but here are direct links to the PDFs for each paper:

The first paper's a bit of a wonkish piece on what makes LightSwitch different and why it's needed in the market. After that formal opening, the papers get less "white" and instead walk through the product in detail, with an abundance of screenshots. If you're curious about the product, this is an easy way to get a good look at it without having to install it or watch a video from beginning to end. I hope that even skeptics will start to see validity in the point I make several times over: while LightSwitch does a lot for you, it also gets out of your way and lets you do a bunch on your own. That's a balance that I don't think a lot of business application productivity tools attain.

The fifth paper covers LightSwitch extensions, which is a topic so late-breaking that I finished the paper less than a week ago. LightSwitch already has extensions offered by Infragistics, DevExpress, ComponentOne, RSSBus, and First Floor Software. Telerik has on its Web site a host of hands-on labs demonstrating how to use its Silverlight components in LightSwitch applications. Extensions from the community are already starting to pop up on the Visual Studio Gallery too. Together these offerings represent rather robust support for a fledgling product, and I expect the them, and the degree of integration in extensions, to continually improve.

Take a look at LightSwitch and keep a lookout for its progress and success. The best way to really get the product is to learn the tooling quickly, then think of a database and application you need to build out and see how fast you can get it running using the product. You may be surprised, not only by how quickly you finish, but by how sturdy and extensible the application you built actually is.

There are no guarantees, but I think LightSwitch could really catch on.

Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 08/12/2011 at 7:09 AM


Reader Comments:

Tue, Jun 12, 2012

Still utter nonsense, more next-to-useless crap. Time to get real, man-up in Redmond, stop pretending they didn't massively mishandle what was their greatest achievement and announce plans for what matters - Silverlight 6. Only way to win us back. Nothing less...

Tue, Nov 15, 2011 Marc Temkin Chicago IL

Post-BUILD conference how is Lightswitch affected? Will this be using HTML5/Metro or XAML? For the intended audience will that matter?

Fri, Sep 23, 2011

I use MS Access reports with extensive code behind them. Is there any support for reporting in LightSwitch?

Wed, Aug 31, 2011 Austin, Texas

Absolutely love the concept for this software tool. I've needed something like this for a long time for my team. BUT we use Oracle and Informix databases in addition to SQL Server. Was it really too hard to include the feature to connect to DBs thru ODBC? Also, I'll be curious to see how successful MS will be in selling this tool. Sounds like developers aren't impressed with it and it still may be a little too complicated or intimidating for non-developers. Why not work on simplifying the UI for ordinary people and make it part of the Office suite. I think MS is missing their target audience. I'd buy it in a second if it would connect to other databases using ODBC.

Sat, Aug 27, 2011 Peter south africa

I've been trying out LightSwitch to replace something that was being done from a fairly complicated excel spread sheet. I’m still working at it and I’m still positive. There is definitely a learning curve and I think that will be quite steep for non-developers. Anyway better get that next feature out.

Mon, Aug 22, 2011 Same Guy

Please put my last post from last week which was deleted back in. Removing it was not a good thing to do on numerous levels. Ironically, I may be more of a supporter of MS software than you are, but removing my last post only amounts to censorship at the expense of free and honest communication and dialog, as well as counterproductive to the larger cause of actually promoting better IT through MS software, and the benefits to society that implies. Also, the Aug. 18 post by another below about a virtualization whitepaper appears unrelated and out of place, so please delete that one instead to keep the thread on topic. Additionally, If you do put my post from last week back in, then of course I'd be perfectly happy for this one to be deleted. Nonetheless, I also have no illusions about what to expect one way or another including for this current post. Thank you.

Fri, Aug 19, 2011 Same Guy Who Posted Here First

Well, you know to tell you the truth, it's also very saddening and unpleasant to not be able to link to Microsoft Access from within Visual Studio LightSwitch if one wants to do so, the way you certainly can through Visual Studio itself. It's just one more sign and indication making one feel as if Access developers have been and are being increasingly and progressively abandoned, and all the time - as in years - and energy they've put into developing and using their skills being thrown overboard and cast into the sea. As one writer I found online put it, it's as if Access is being rendered "irrelevant"; that author's thought was that it may simply have to do with merely licensing issues. I've been looking into the WCF RIA services thing, and so far despite the comments you may find touting it as being so great and easy, it's not going well at all. I'm not feeling the easy breezey ease at all - perhaps maybe some aspect of it is simply not working, but frankly it's not even clear what is going wrong, and so far has proven very time consuming, difficult and abstruse to even pursue. Frankly, I'm done with it now. The bottom line is that "Access.NET" is still long overdue and saddeningly also nowhere in sight. While LightSwitch does certainly appear to have some obvious elements of usefulness and value, speaking for myself as a serious Access developer wanting that sought for bridge to the Web and .NET, frankly I'm afraid it still leaves me feeling pretty bleak overall.

Thu, Aug 18, 2011 5media

whitepaper by Microsoft aims at proving to be one of the best virtualization solution suppliers as they deal with the key terms: security, cost control and reliability http://v12ntoday.com/blogposts/microsoft-desktop-virtualization-whitepaper-released.html

Wed, Aug 17, 2011

Thanks, Andrew, that's encouraging. I look forward to that ODAC development then and plan to check out your white paper in the meantime. As a side note, I'm coming to LightSwitch as an Access developer who does do a lot of VBA work with it, but definitely not anyone yet within a mile of being an advanced VS user or ASP.NET developer. I'm the guy who made the Fri, May 20, 2011 post about wishing there was an "Access.NET" alternative here: ("Is Visual Studio LightSwitch the New Access?") http://visualstudiomagazine.com/Articles/2011/05/01/pcovb_Using-LightSwitch.aspx?Page=3. Since LightSwitch appears to be the only closest MS-sourced intermediate option to that for folks like me to explore now, I'm checking it out.

Mon, Aug 15, 2011 Andrew J. Brust New York City

You haven't missed anything. There is no support for Oracle built-in to LightSwitch. However, you can create a WCF RIA Service around your Oracle database and connect your LightSwitch application to that service. I provide details on creating such a service in white paper #3 ("Get More from Your Data"). Also, there is work going on between Oracle, the LightSwitch team and the Entity Framework team to make the Oracle Data Access Components (ODAC) for Microsoft Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities provider (http://bit.ly/nCn6xE) LightSwitch-compatible. When and if that happens, you will be able to connect to an Oracle database using the same procedure required to connect to an external SQL Server or SQL Azure database.

Fri, Aug 12, 2011

I'm using it now, just learning, that is. I need to be able to connect to Oracle as well as SQL Server, not just SQL Server. If it were up to me, just connecting to SQL Server would be just fine, even preferred, but it's not up to me. I doubt there are not many others in a similar situation as well. Whether it's a direct or indirect connection such as through ODBC, You can connect to Oracle even from Access, and you can connect to Oracle from Visual Studio, too. When you have Visual Studio instead of only a standalone install of LightSwitch, the latter gets added into the former as well; however, you still can't use the LightSwitch data connect feature to reach Oracle. Unless I've simply missed something or am just not aware of some other easy route for doing so, this is something very much needed. I appreciate the idea of encouraging use of SQL Server, but this type of flexibility already available not only through VS but even through Access XP is essential. The organization I work for may already be spending millions of dollars per year on licensing MS software, some of which already includes SQL Server, so I hope this feature will be added. Is there anything I've simply missed here, or is there an easy workaround at least? Thanks.

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