| How To: Handle Database Concurrency Issues Concurrency issues are common in multi-user applications that have a database on the backend. Suppose you read a table record and then another user comes along and makes changes to the same record. Unless you re-read (e.g. refresh) your record, the data becomes stale. If you then attempt to make changes to the stale record, the application must detect and handle any data conflicts that may have occurred. For example, the other user may have modified the exact same field or may have even deleted the entire record. Clearly, the task of detecting and handling concurrency issues is not only important, but also quite complicated. The good news is that LightSwitch makes More... 18-8-2011, Nicole Haugen |
| How to Allow Adding of Data to an Auto-Complete Drop-down Box in LightSwitch In my last post I showed you how to create a multi-column auto-complete box in Visual Studio LightSwitch. I also showed you how to use multiple layouts and easily enable editing on the data inside the auto-complete box. In this post I want to address another very common use case in business applications – allowing the user to enter new rows of data directly into the auto-complete box. Our auto-complete box is displaying data from a lookup table and we want to allow users to add data to this table if they don’t see the selection they need. I’ll continue More... 16-8-2011, Beth Massi |
| Visual Studio LightSwitch Technical White Paper Series Andrew Brust from Blue Badge Insights has just published a great series of whitepapers on Visual Studio LightSwitch aimed at educating you on what LightSwitch is and what it can do for you. Check out the PDFs below. What is LightSwitch? This is the first in a series of white papers about Microsoft® Visual Studio® LightSwitch™ 2011, Microsoft’s new streamlined development environment for designing data-centric business applications. We’ll provide an overview of the product that includes analysis of the market need it meets, More... 11-8-2011, LightSwitch Team |
| Submit Your Ideas for Future Versions of Visual Studio LightSwitch We just launched a new feedback site called UserVoice that makes it easy for you to tell us what you want to see in the next versions of Visual Studio LightSwitch. It gathers and sorts ideas by popularity, giving us an immediate view of the most requested features. Just head to More... 10-8-2011, LightSwitch Team |
| Updated WPI Feed for LightSwitch Server Runtime We've updated the Windows Platform Installer (WPI) feeds for the Visual Studio LightSwitch server runtime components. Previously there was only a single option that would install the server runtime components along with SQL Server Express which we considered to be the primary deployment scenario for LightSwitch applications. We've received feedback to make this optional for scenarios where a full version of SQL Server is installed or the database may be hosted on a different tier. In the latest WPI feed you will now see two options for the LightSwitch server More... 10-8-2011, LightSwitch Team |
| How To: Using the Created Method to Set Default Property Values An extremely useful method that I consider to be a “must-have” in almost any type of LightSwitch application is the Created method. The Created method allows us to easily set the default values for an entity’s properties (e.g. fields in a table). To understand this further, let’s dive into an example that shows how to use the Created method. If you read my first blog post on how to Prevent a Hole with Security Access Control, then you may remember in that scenario that I More... 8-8-2011, Nicole Haugen |
| How to Create a Multi-Column Auto-Complete Drop-down Box in LightSwitch In this post I’d like to address a very common usage of drop-downs (otherwise known as Combo-boxes or Auto-complete boxes) that allow users to pick from a list of values coming from a lookup or parent table, commonly referred to as “Lookup lists”. Typically these lists display one column like the “Name” of the item. But often times we want to display multiple columns of information to the user here. This is not only super-simple to do in Visual Studio LightSwitch, it’s incredibly flexible on what kind of layouts you can create. In this post I will walk through a variety of common layouts using the Auto-complete box in LightSwitch. You should keep in mind that most of these techniques are not limited to the Auto-complete box at all. In fact you will see these layout controls are available to you almost anywhere on the screen. Let’s get started! More... 4-8-2011, Beth Massi |
| Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 RTM is Here! As Jason Zander just announced, we released Visual Studio LightSwitch today, whoohooo! It’s been a long, fun road from Beta 1 and 2 to our final release and we are so excited to get this into your hands today! Visual Studio LightSwitch is the newest edition of the Visual Studio family and is the simplest way to build business applications for the desktop and the cloud. For the end-user developer this means you can quickly create professional quality business applications with minimal code. For the professional developer you can customize LightSwitch More... 2-8-2011, LightSwitch Team |
| Visual Studio LightSwitch Extensibility Toolkit Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch gives you a simpler and faster way to create high-quality business applications for the desktop and the cloud. Professional developers can extend the functionality of LightSwitch by creating extensions using Visual Studio 2010 Professional, the Visual Studio SDK, and the Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 Extensibility Toolkit. The toolkit provides project types for creating new LightSwitch Extension Libraries and includes templates for creating your own themes, shells, business types, controls, screen templates, and data sources. More... 24-7-2011, LightSwitch Team |
| Relating and Editing Data from Multiple Data Sources on the Same Screen In my last article I showed how to connect LightSwitch to SharePoint data in order to pull users’ Task Lists into your LightSwitch applications. If you missed it: Using SharePoint Data in your LightSwitch Applications There we created a screen that pulled up the logged in users’ tasks from SharePoint so they could modify them directly. We created a new screen to do this which presented just the data from SharePoint. In this post I want to show you how you can relate SharePoint data to data stored in the database and then present that on a single screen. There are a couple lines of code you need to write when you want to edit data from multiple data sources regardless if that data is coming from SharePoint or another data source like an external database. For a video demonstration More... 11-7-2011, Beth Massi |
More resources |
Microsoft reveals Visual Studio LightSwitch
Microsoft announced Visual Studio LightSwitch (previously codenamed Kitty Hawk), it is the newest member of the Visual Studio product family.
Microsoft says that LightSwitch is aimed at developers of all skill levels and organizational sizes who want to build business applications that target the desktop, cloud, and Web. It will be available as part of Visual Studio Professional, Premium, and Ultimate.
A beta did become available on August 23 to MSDN Subscribers, with general availability to follow, and the software giant is hoping to get feedback as it works on getting a final version released by next year.
Developers can choose from a wide variety of hosting, deployment, and third-party plug-in options. Deployment is simplified in that applications (which are at their core Silverlight applications) can be deployed to the client, browser, and even Windows Azure (post-beta). LightSwitch can be used with C# or Visual Basic and it supports SQL Server, SQL Azure, SharePoint, and Microsoft Office.
Visual Studio LightSwitch includes pre-built templates and tools in a simplified development environment for building scalable custom business applications that connect with existing applications, legacy systems, and Web services.
It's a rapid application development tool that offers application shells and screen templates to allow the developer to concentrate on the core business logic. Microsoft says that LightSwitch dramatically decreases the time it takes to build a custom application by automatically handling routine code.
if you need to tinker under the hood, you can do so by opening your LightSwitch application in the "full" version of Visual Studio. There's also a lot of "drag and drop" functionality, but full access to the .NET Framework is still available.
First steps to get started:
.png) | Download Visual Studio LightSwitch |
.png) | Watch the instructional LightSwitch "How Do I?" videos. |
.png) | Read the LightSwitch tutorials. |
.png) | Get the LightSwitch Training Kit. |
.png) | Ask questions in the LightSwitch forums. |
This is a new website where you will find all information about Microsoft LightSwitch there is available on the internet. A specialised team is updating the resources daily.
If you can't find it here, It's not on the internet!
The website is still in beta, more filtering/searching features will be added.
