Microsoft launches LightSwitch
Posted on 23 August 2011
Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is a simplified self-service development tool that enables you to build business applications quickly and easily for the desktop and cloud.
It is targeted at the thousands of business applications that never get developed for time and budget constraints. These business applications are vital to a business and will be impletmented by the end users themselves as a mixture of spreadsheets and other office documents.
The idea is you can develop a fully fledged application in a matter of hours that is both scalable and secure and can run either on the desktop or over the internet in a web browser running Microsoft Silverlight.
It does this by generating all of the standard 'plumbing code' for you, handling things like database connections and user management. It also generates standard screens, navigation menus and data validation. This is all fully customisable. There are also starter kits available for common applications like Expense Tracker, Issue Tracker, Time Tracker and Customer Service.
We spent an afternoon with LightSwitch in the office and did built a simple application based on one of our existing Windows desktop applications (so we didn't have to design a database from scratch) and deployed it to the web. We were quite impressed, although to do a proper job would have taken a lot longer than a few hours.
I'm sure we will use LightSwitch in a commercial project very soon - watch this space. For more information, visit the Microsoft LightSwitch website.
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