Moving On

Is Visual Studio LightSwitch the right tool?

During the past year, I spent quite some time doing research on the LightSwitch product and my journey in its metadata-driven implementation has been a life-altering experience. LightSwitch 2012 RC uses a newer version of Silverlight on the client tier and an entirely different technology on the server tier (which also opens up the application to create clients in any other technology) than its predecessor, and the fact that my LightSwitch 1.0 applications can be converted without any modifications, a refactoring battle that would normally take years to complete, proves to me that LightSwitch does something in application development more “right” than I could ever dream of.

In one IDE, citizen developers, professional developers, and expert developers come together to create the best data-centric applications in the shortest amount of time.

Citizen developers, traditionally people with limited technical knowledge or coding skills but who know and understand business problems like no others, can use simple yet powerful editors to design an application without ever suffering from hitting a brick wall, something most rapid application development IDEs suffer from, thanks to the numerous level-one extensibility points.

Professional developers can stray away from the tasks they find boring because they feel it doesn’t challenge them, and focus on what they do best: delivering reusable capabilities in the form of level-two extensions: reusable control suites, business types, shells, themes, etc.

The Microsoft LightSwitch teams, as expert developers, make sure the characteristics of citizen and professional developers blend together in powerful line-of-business applications that follow the best and industry-accepted technologies and architectural trends.

If the software challenge at hand has anything to do with data, and that’s the biggest “if” when considering whether LightSwitch is a suitable tool, I’ll always be eager to use LightSwitch to solve it. And not just because of the blazingly fast results you can get with the product, but for the enjoyable development experience as well.

Learning more about Visual Studio LightSwitch

If this e-book has even slightly convinced you to learn more about Visual Studio LightSwitch, there are a couple of great places to get started.

• Microsoft’s official LightSwitch Developer Center (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lightswitch/default) is a great place to get started. Beth Massi (www.BethMassi.com), nicknamed “the LightSwitch goddess” by the community, is the most publicly visible senior LightSwitch program manager and has created numerous “getting started” videos and tutorials. New content of both introductory-level and expert-level topics is added at least on a weekly basis. A great monthly community content “rollup” is posted that has links to MSDN forums where LightSwitch team members will help you with any question or problem you might have if other community members haven’t already beat them to it.
• Michael Washington, one of the LightSwitch community’s greatest rock stars, hosts the LightSwitch help website (http://www.LightSwitchHelpWebsite.com). This unofficial community portal offers a lot of great links, a forum where the community members help each other out, and a marketplace where anyone can sell his or her services and extensions. Michael frequently treats visitors to new innovative articles intended more for experts than novices.
• You’ll find many interesting, privately held blogs by other rock stars in the LightSwitch community scattered throughout the Internet. Representing the different backgrounds of the authors, these blogs often discuss very different aspects of LightSwitch, or approach it from a very different angle. My personal blog, for example (http://janvanderhaegen.wordpress.com), focuses solely on the internals of the framework, whereas Paul Patterson’s blog (http://www.paulspatterson.com/) shows some amazing craftsmanship that even citizen developers could pull off. The image in the introduction of this book shows a LightSwitch application called A Little Productivity which he created and deployed to Azure in less than one week—an experience that he has blogged about in depth.
• I also created a bot that monitors different official and unofficial sources, including the blogs of some of the most experienced community members like Yann Duran, Jan D’hondt, The SD Times, Dan Beall, Paul Van Bladel, Keith Craigo, Kostas Christodoulou, Stu (stuxstu), Regan Ashworth, Allesandro del Sole, Michael Washington, Bala (Tek Freak), Tim Leung, Paul Patterson, Jewel Lambert, and Rashmi Ranjan Panigrahi. Whenever any interesting LightSwitch material pops up on the web, the bot tweets under the @LightSwitchNews account. If you feel anyone is missing from this list, I must apologize as it is a sign of ignorance on my account. Feel free to let me know and I’ll gladly make the bot up to date.