14 DAY TRIAL // With Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 having been released to manufacturing this week, Microsoft is starting to provide customers with additional resources designed to enhance the new solution. Case in point: the Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 RTM Extensibility Toolkit, which is now live and available for download through the Visual Studio 2010 Gallery.
As the official label implies, the Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 Extensibility Toolkit enables developers to build extensions of LightSwitch 2011, adding functionality to the solution.
“Professional developers can extend the functionality of LightSwitch by creating extensions using Visual Studio 2010 Professional, the Visual Studio SDK, and the Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 Extensibility Toolkit,” a LightSwitch Team representative said.
“The toolkit provides project types for creating new LightSwitch Extension Libraries and includes templates for creating your own themes, shells, business types, controls, screen templates, and data sources.”
In addition to the Visual Studio LightSwitch Extensibility Toolkit, devs will be able to get their hands on a range of additional resources, including documentation, code samples but also walkthroughs, the software giant said.
While Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 RTM hits general availability only today, July 28th, 2011, the Redmond company is already allowing MSDN subscribers to download and use the solution.
In addition, Microsoft also made available for download a free Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 RTM trial release.
“Visual Studio LightSwitch is the newest edition of the Visual Studio family and is the simplest way to build business applications for the desktop and the cloud,” revealed a member of the LightSwitch Team.
“For the end-user developer this means you can quickly create professional quality business applications with minimal code. For the professional developer you can customize LightSwitch with your own code, controls and even build extensions that can add more capabilities than what you get out of the box.”
Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 Extensibility Toolkit is available for download here. Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 RTM Trial is available for download here.