For Windows and the Cloud

Aug 4, 2010 12:19 GMT  ·  By

The latest addition to the Visual Studio family, Visual Studio LightSwitch is designed to make application development as easy as flipping a switch. By extending the Visual Studio product-lineup, Microsoft is essentially targeting business customers, introducing a solution which will streamline app development, without requiring them to actually write any code. S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division revealed that with Visual Studio LightSwitch, Microsoft is providing businesses with a simple and fact way to build basic applications designed to run on Windows computers, in the Windows Azure Cloud, or on the web.

“LightSwitch provides a variety of pre-built templates and tools to build business applications that target Windows Client or Windows Azure using as much or as little code as you want to write. With LightSwitch, there is now a tool that better enables business domain experts to easily build professional-quality line-of-business applications without focusing on writing code. This is critical because these business applications - which may be built out of a short-term need - often need to be extended and IT supported,” Somasegar said.

“You can build forms from existing templates and populate them with data from data sources including SQL Server, SQL Azure, SharePoint, and others. There is integrated support for working with Microsoft Office for tasks such as exporting data to Excel without having to write code. Within minutes you can have a basic business application created and ready to deploy, leveraging disparate data sources and Office tools. While developing your application, you can modify the application as it runs,” he added.

The first choice that customers will have to do is whether to leverage Visual Basic or C# for their line-of-business applications. Of course, the apps that LightSwitch can help create are extremely simple. However, the Redmond company has already thought about this. Microsoft indicated that customers will always be able to hand over the initial apps to real developers in order to have them extend the solutions.

“LightSwitch creates Silverlight applications that can run in the browser, out-of-the-browser, or in the cloud. When your application grows, you can use Visual Studio 2010 Professional, Premium or Ultimate to extend and customize it further. In the coming months, we'll provide more details about LightSwitch. We will be making the first beta of LightSwitch available broadly on August 23rd,” Somasegar noted.

Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download
here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download
here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download
here.

.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.

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