Today I was able download Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 1 from my MSDN Subscription. The ISO is just about 500MB. I’m so excited in starting to build some simple application with Visual Studio LightSwitch.
After Visual Studio LightSwitch installed, it integrated with my current Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. And VS2010 has two new project template for LightSwitch
VSLS gives you 2 options, Visual C# or Visual Basic! Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is very powerful when gives you a lot of options to build your pro application. But now, VSLS gives you another option, the simplest way to build your application.
To introduce features of LightSwitch to you, I’ll create new project to manage my contact list.
Here is the first page when you create new project successfully.
As you can see how simply VSLS is, with two option from the first page, you don’t need to go through complicated database operations. The things you have to do just are Create new table for your application’s data or connect to your existing database. For my application here, I choose the first option, Create new table.
Here is my simple Contact entity. VSLS provides to you some very useful data type of property of entity such as EmailAddress, PhoneNumber. You can modify properties of entity’s property, you can add relationship between entities, add advanced properties to your entity like Computed-property, create custom query in your entities, … For example, I add another property FullName which is combined from FirstName and LastName to my Contact entity.
After finishing create application’s data, my next step is creating “screens” for my application.
When creating screens, you can choose which type of screen you’ll create and which type of screen data. Here, I create new screen which is used for creating new Contact.
The image below show you the designer when you customize screens. You can manage layout of the screen, add controls to screens, … and of cause, you can add custom control to your screens. Now, press F5 and look what we’ve done
Yeah, the UI looks very cool. There are something special, fields validate automatically, PhoneNumber editor is very cool with no lines of code. And another special thing is you can customize your screen directly from here, don’t need stop debugging and back to VSLS.
So on, now I add another screens such as Search, List …
There are some cool features of Visual Studio LightSwitch. Now, Visual Studio 2010 helps you code like wind but Visual Studio LightSwitch helps you build your application like wind.
Visual Studio LightSwitch also give you option to bring your application to browser by setting properties of project
And the final things I want to tell you that Visual Studio LightSwitch also target to the cloud, it means you can use SQL Azure as your data source and hosting your services, application on Azure.