Software giant Microsoft unveiled Visual Studio LightSwitch designed for developers who are looking for a tool that targets the Desktop, Silverlight, and Azure cloud minus the complexity of hardcore programming. Microsoft LightSwitch beta is now available for download. MS LightSwitch has its own UI Shell though the created projects can be opened in Visual Studio IDE for extensibility.
If you are a familiar Visual Studio WebMatrix, well, Microsoft LightSwitch is for the Silverlight UI while the former is for HTML UI which means the target audience is different at best.
At a glance, Microsoft LightSwitch will not be attractive to the hardcore programmers especially to those who religiously follow Design Patterns. But knowing Microsoft, we don’t exactly predict what’s in store for this product in the coming versions.
Some interviewed developers are excited about LightSwitch and predicting that this product will help push Silverlight applications to the its maximum potential.
Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch demonstrates Entity Framework at work for the data layer. LightSwitch as a web development tool was previously code-named “Kitty Hawk.” It will be actually made available as a part of Visual Studio Professional, Premium, and Ultimate.
Microsoft says at August 2010 VSLive!, the Visual Studio LightSwitch is aimed at the developers possessing skills at different levels and varied sizes of organizations, who actually are interested to build business applications that are targeted at the Web, cloud, and desktop.
More about Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch click HERE
Watch Visual Studio LightSwitch short demo video streaming online
Here are some early comments about Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch via MSDN blogs:
“Dare I stand out and say LightSwitch seems like a useful RAD tool reminiscent a tad of Microsoft Access with wizardry style ability to create data and forms, but with a managed code (.NET Framework) backend… While most of us cringe at the thought of Access and VBA it had/has its place and can be useful. Not by any means that this is Access; it is probably 100x more. But I agree with previous comments. Not every single-form, data entry app request needs to have full blow n-layer, OO architecture, etc., etc. applied. And this coming from soneone that loves to work on the latter. I think LightSwitch will prevail as a good tool for certain types of LOB applications that do not need the advanced architecture and design of other apps, but yet still have the full power of the .NET Framework. Seems like it fills a niche where there is a void. And I applaud MSFT for continuing to come out with new products to keep the .NET front strong.” – AtConWay
MSDN Blogger Jason Zanders has this to say:
LightSwitch is a Visual Studio product. We still expect people to use Access for building out applications, especially information workers. But we wanted an easier way to produce business applications that directly utilize .NET features.
LightSwitch is not meant to replace Visual Studio Professional or the kinds of apps you can build there. It is good for rapidly producing an application. The app the tool produces does target a 3-tier architecture, it is built directly on .NET features (many you’d be writing yourself anyway), and you can use advanced language features like LINQ in the code you write. As I mentioned in the post it won’t be for every developer or every application, but for some apps it’s great.
LightSwitch maintains all of the relationship data from your entities and your screens and it fixes them for you. In the post above, I added a new column for employee images. All I had to do to display that was add the new field into the screen field list and hit F5. From that perspective it is actually much easier to use than solutions that require code generation from schema.
At a high level LightSwitch really is optimized for the “forms over data” scenario. So if you want to do a lot of custom animation or advanced user interaction, you’d have to do a customized template which is a lot of work (we do expect a set to come in from partners). Most things will fall into that bucket. Beyond that your big escape hatch is going out to code and writing what you want on .NET.
LightSwitch is not meant to replace Access (it is still primarily for programmers) and it is also not meant to replace application architectures that are sophisticated in nature (multiple work flows, multiple services you are building, etc). It’s sweet spot is targeting business applications which want to mash up a lot of data but still give you the power of .NET.
I’ve definitely seen some very innovative Excel/Access/etc applications. Anyone who can write those kind of apps I think will find LightSwitch approachable. But also to be clear we do view LightSwitch as a companion to Office, not a replacement. They go great together!
Our goal was to take the very common patterns for these kinds of applications and make it easy to get going. Our hope is that productivity translates for you, the professional developer. We definitely don’t expect (desire) to be comprehensive in that approach. We’ll do more to outline what is possible vs where you will continue to write your own architecture and implementation.
