Mar 18, 2011 09:15 GMT  ·  By

Downloads of the second Beta development milestone of Visual Studio LightSwitch are now available to the public, after earlier this week they were released for MSDN subscribers.

Visual Studio LightSwitch is designed to simplify and speed up the process of building business applications running on-premise, in the Cloud, but also spanning across the two.

At the same time, LightSwitch has been delivered with an as broad as possible developer base in mind.

“Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 is a flexible, business application development tool that aides developers of all skill levels to quickly build and deploy professional-quality desktop and web business applications,” the company said.

“Beta 2 includes performance updates, improved publishing to Windows Azure and SQL Azure and support for custom data source queries.”

Developers can not only take Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 out for a spin but also use it into production, since the software giant slapped a go-live license on the release.

They’ll need Visual Studio 2011 SP1 RTM in order to do so however, and if they previously tested Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 1 they’ll also need to get rid of it ahead of deploying Beta 2.

The Redmond company revealed that the evolution from Beta 1 to Beta 2 introduced a series of breaking changes and that older projects would need to be re-created under the latest development milestone of Visual Studio LightSwitch, since simply upgrading or migrating them are not valid options.

There will no longer be any breaking changes introduced from Beta 2 to RTM, so at least the projects created from now on will not be impacted by future releases of Visual Studio LightSwitch.

I also told you yesterday that Microsoft had provided a new version of the Training Kit associated with Visual Studio LightSwitch, tailored to the Beta 2 Build.

Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 is available for download here. Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 Training Kit is available for download here. Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM ISO and Installer are available for download here.