Developing Real-world Applications with LightSwitch

In 2010, Microsoft announced LightSwitch, a product aimed at developing Line-of-Business applications with ease. In July 2011, the beta tag was finally removed from the product as Microsoft officially introduced Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 as a new member of the Visual Studio family. Many however are still unsure about the product. Questions crossing a lot of minds include “Is it something for me?”, “What can I do with it?”, “Where should I use it?”, “Is it more than Microsoft Access?”, “Am I limited to what’s in the box?” and quite a few more.

For this reason, I have decided that an ebook should be in place to give you a clear understanding of LightSwitch. I won’t be saying that you should use LightSwitch for this or that. Using a sample application we will build throughout the series, I will try giving you an overview of how we can use it to build a real-world application. By reading this ebook, I hope you’ll be able to make up your mind whether or not LightSwitch is something for you.

More specifically, I plan the following topics to be tackled along the way:

•What is LightSwitch and where I see it being useful
•The concepts of a LightSwitch application
•Data in more detail
•Screens in more detail
•Queries in more detail
•Writing business logic and validation
•Managing security in a LightSwitch application
•Deploying a LightSwitch application
•Extensions - what and how
•Using custom Silverlight controls in LightSwitch
•Adapting the LightSwitch UI to your needs
•Using RIA Services