14 DAY TRIAL // Announced over a week ago, the second Beta development milestone of Visual Studio LightSwitch is now available for download. Microsoft is currently offering Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 only to MSDN subscribers, with downloads live as of March 15th, 2011.
However, starting on March 17th, the software giant will allow all developers to download Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2.
According to a member of the LightSwitch team, the Beta 2 release comes with a go-live license, enabling customers to not only test the technology, but also use it into production projects.
Developers running the Express, Professional, Premium, Test Professional or Ultimate SKUs of Visual Studio 2010 are advised to upgrade to Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM, and only subsequently to deploy Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2.
In addition, those already testing the previous release of LightSwitch will need to uninstall Beta 1 before making the jump to Beta 2.
One developer asked me whether there are braking changes between Beta 1 and Beta 2. Unfortunately, the answer is yes.
In fact, the changes between the two Betas make it impossible for Beta 1 projects to be opened or upgraded in Beta 2.
The best course of action for developers is to fire up File View in the Solution Explorer and copy all user code they worked on to the new re-created projects in Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2.
It’s critical to note, that due to API modification, the user code itself might need re-working.
However, there’s also some good news. Microsoft doesn’t plan any major new braking changes between Beta 2 and RTM for Visual Studio LightSwitch, so this transition should be done without any problems.
Devs also asked me about the changes in Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2, and Jason Zander, corporate vice president of the Visual Studio Team provided a nice summary:
“•Publish to Azure: the Publish Wizard now provides the ability to publish a LightSwitch desktop or browser application to Windows Azure, including the application’s database to SQL Azure.
•Improved runtime and design-time performance: Build times are 50% faster in Beta 2 and we have made the build management smarter to improve iterative F5 scenarios by up to 70%. LightSwitch Beta 2 applications will startup up to 30% faster than Beta 1.
•Runtime UI improvements: Auto-complete box, better keyboard navigation, and improved end-user experience for long-running operations.
•Allow any authenticated Window user: When Windows authorization was selected in a LightSwitch app, you previously needed to add the Windows users who are allowed to use the application into the User Administration screen of the running application.”
Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM ISO and Installer are available for download here.