Friday, August 27, 2010

Visual Studio LightSwitch

From Tim Anderson at The Register:

Some two years in the making, it aims to simplify the building of business database applications, particularly at the departmental or small business level, but to do so in a way that respects Microsoft's current ideas about best-practice software architecture.

You can think of it as a modern-day Access or FoxPro, except that this is 2010 and LightSwitch builds Silverlight applications, both desktop and browser-hosted, that retrieve data over the internet or intranet and which might even run on a Mac.

From Andrew J. Brust at Visual Studio Magazine:
LightSwitch, which produces Silverlight forms-over-data applications, needs to target Windows Phone 7. Access Web Databases, which deploy as forms-over-data SharePoint applications, should perhaps have some conformity with LightSwitch, and vice-versa.

LightSwitch targets SQL Server Express by default. WebMatrix targets SQL Server Compact. Access Web databases target SharePoint lists and SQL Server Reporting Services. In other words, each of these exciting new tools targets SQL Server in some way (SharePoint lists are stored in SQL Server tables), but none of them targets the same edition of the product.

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