Microsoft LightSwitch

What is LightSwitch?

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is a development environment designed to simplify and shorten the development of businesses applications. Regardless of your development skills—whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer—LightSwitch enables you to quickly create professional-quality business applications and data services.
LightSwitch makes it easy to create data-centric business applications that can consume a variety of data sources and create clients that can run on a variety of devices. With LightSwitch, your application can point to an existing data source—or databases that are automatically created—without the need to write plumbing code.


How LightSwitch Works?

For the user interfaces, LightSwitch provides screens that are based on predefined templates that you can customize. They allow you to display data automatically by simply specifying which elements you want to show. You can create rich desktop clients that are optimized for navigating large amounts of data with a mouse and keyboard, and you can create HTML5-based clients that are optimized for touch-enabled modern mobile devices. The screens are customizable which means you can use third-party controls and extensions or roll your own.
For the business logic, LightSwitch allows you to do simple validation such as required fields, formatting, and minimum numeric values. But LightSwitch also gives developers the ability to write more complex business logic code for scenarios like controlling changes to a data source or performing authorization operations.


How easy to learn?

Learning Lightswitch is very easy. In a single day you will be able to know what it is and within a week you will be expert. There are many resources available on MSDN and step by step videos tutorials through which you will understand it very clearly and easily. For working examples and projects you can navigate to LightSwitch team blog located at below url:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lightswitch/
Many examples are given with screen prints of each steps which makes easy to understand and create applications.


Where you can use LighSwitch?

Applications build using LightSwitch are compatible for most of the devices. You can use it Windows, Mac operating systems and all HTML5 supported desktop and mobile browsers. User Interface runs on either Microsoft Silver Light, HTML 5 Client or as a Sharepoint 2013 app.


The Architecture

  Although it very easy to design and create application using LightSwitch, but if you will explore its structure you will find it little bit complex. It almost uses all the available technologies of .net framework. See below the architecture of LightSwitch:

Development Requirement

LightSwitch was released on July 2011 and at that time it was a standalone application and was used by integrating with visual studio 2010 and provides limited feature. With the release of Visual Studio 2012 (update 2), LightSwitch become more rich and powerful. You can create HTML5 apps for Windows 8 and other, Sharepoint 2013 app along with standalone applications.



References

1.  Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio#Visual_Studio_LightSwitch_2012]

2.      Microsoft LightSwitch Team Blog [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lightswitch]