Visual Studio LightSwitch First Look

Visual Studio LightSwitch (previously codenamed Kitty Hawk) is a new VS extension from Microsoft which is targeted at professional developers looking to create custom enterprise apps using data from multiple sources.

Developers building apps for large enterprises often encounter the problem that the data required to be pulled into the app exists in numerous different repositories such as SQL Server databases, SharePoint, SQL Azure, and WCF services. Visual Studio LightSwitch allows developers to seemless integrate this disparate data sources into a unified model which they can work with using the Visual Studio design surface.

The task of creating apps is further simplified with the inclusion of several inbuilt templates (complete with boilerplate code and design layout) for common app features such as screens for creating new records:

LightSwitch Templates

Apps built using LightSwitch can also integrate with Office 2010, the below screenshot shows data exported to Excel:

LightSwitch exporting data to Excel

LightSwitch apps will all be Silverlight based apps which can use with C# or VB or their core programming language.  Deployment is simplified and applications  can be deployed to the client, browser, or even  Azure.

Details are still a bit thin on LightSwitch but I will update this overview once the  beta is released  on August 23 (to MSDN Subscribers only at first). A final version is planned for release early next year.

See Visual Studio LightSwitch Tutorial for more LightSwitch tutorials