LightSwitch with @melaniadanciu #devsum13

Melania starts off her presentation, setting the mood by playing The Script's Hall of Fame ("You can be the greatest, you can be the best … The world's gonna know your name …"). 

Lightswitch has had its up and down and recently got a bashing with Microsoft stopping to push Silverlight. What few knows, however, is that - first off - their Visual Studio installation comes with Lightswitch pre-installed (look in your project templates (Applies to Visual Studio 2012)), and - second off - Lightswitch now produces HTML5 output alongside its Silverlight support.

Jay Schmelzer, the creator of Lightswitch, describes the product as "The easiest way to create modern line of business applications for the enterprise."

It can be used for rapid prototyping too, as it quickly helps you create a three-tier solution with little-to-no custom coding, leaving your more time to discuss the final product with your client, rather than spending your time writing demos.

What LightSwitch promises, is the generation of a line of business app using modern technologies and appropriate abstractions, giving you code that you can maintain and build upon.

It's a great tool for quick prototyping - to make a HTML app that you can bring to your customer and discuss around, before you pour down a lot of effort into Native development.

Lightswitch enables an easy-to-use Sharepoint integration.

As far as architecture is concerned, LS creates a three tier system:
- Clients in Silverlight 5 and HTML 5
- Middle tier with ASP.NET 4+ and OData Services
- Backend on SQL Server or SQL Azure

There is a lot of resources available if you were to get started with LightSwitch: You are not alone and you will not get stuck.

As you start Visual Studio and pick LightSwitch, you can choose to start building either the Silverlight or the HTML client app. You can add the other project type to your solution later.

There are a Logical and a File view option in the Solution Explorer. The Logical view, simplifies the interface somewhat, showing you a Client and a Server folder, whereas the File View is the classical Solution Explorer we're more used for.

LightSwitch clients are pluggable, why I expect to see more clients as adaptation increases.

You could use LightSwitch to generate a service tier, or a full application.

LightSwitch also pre-generates methods which you can call from Wizards to tie your UI together. This can be used to show a details view on an object form a list view, for example.

You can choose to publish your project to Azure as a Web Site or as a Cloud Service. The latter provides you with a Remote Desktop Connection.


http://mela.ro/ 

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