Visual Studio LightSwitch or Visual Studio 2011
This resource will describe about the new development tool which is the extension of Visual Studio 2011 with lot of features as inbuilt so that the developer only need to think about the application business logic rather than thinking about the whole application architecture and design. Learn Visual Studio LightSwitch or Visual Studio 2011
It is about Visual Studio LightSwitch or Visual Studio 2011
Hi Friends,
This resource will describe about the new development tool which is the extension of Visual Studio 2011 with lot of features as inbuilt so that the developer only need to think about the application business logic rather than thinking about the whole application architecture and design.
So due to this reason, the Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 helps to build business applications very quickly. The LightSwitch provides a development environment which enables to concentrate only on the business logic to develop the applications quickly.
If we see the developments sometimes back than the current release of the Visual Studio tools, the applications requires a good architecture which consists all the Application Layer/UI layer with its Business Logic as well as the DataAccess logic also. So as a developer, we need to more concentrate about the data retrieval, insert/update and delete. So we need to write the code for our UI part, to implement business logic, we have to write the business logic layer code as well to interact with the data, and we also need to write the DataAccess layer.
Here the LightSwitch has lot many advantages over the ole versions. Like most of the task which is repetitive will be done automatically by the LightSwitch. Also we can create the whole application even without writing any code, or we just need to write the Business Logic for the application. Rest all things will be done by the LightSwitch itself.
Features of LightSwitch Applications:
The Light switch application contains many default functionality which is required for every business applications like
- Search capabilities: – the business application will have the search feature to search the contents inside the business applications.
- Sort capabilities: - The business application will also have the sorting and rearranging capabilities in the grid where the data is displayed.
- Export: – this is also a generic requirement where the export feature is also built-in. Means all the business application created by using LightSwitch will have default export functionality of the data.
- Addition to all the above features, the LightSwitch application will also have the default features to add, update, save and delete features.
- The data validation logic is also built-in in the LightSwitch business applications. It means the data which is inserted/updated or deleted can be controlled by using the validations.
- Extended features: - With the above all features, there are few extended features like appearance of the application, we can use custom controls.
Also we can format the UI by writing the custom business types.
Entities in LightSwitch Business Applications:
The LightSwitch business applications use data entities and screens to simplify the development.
Data Entities are nothing but the tables in SQL Server. We can create the data entities by using the built-in data base creation feature or we can create our own database for the application. We can also import the database from some external source and use it for the business application. The external source can be the SharePoint lists or any other data source.
There is the graphical designer which can be used to query on the data and we can modify the query inside the code itself.
Screens/Forms in LightSwitch Business Applications:
Screens are nothing but the simple forms to display data. These screens are the predefined templates available in LightSwitch,
We just need to bind the data to a particular screen template by specifying the entities directly or we can use the query to display the data in the screens.
The template screens are customizable so that as per the desired appearance, we can modify its appearances.
To customize the screen, there is no code required. So its code free while customization.
Validations in LightSwitch Applications:
For the simple validations like required field or string length, no need to write any code.
We just need to set the property in the form and it will handle that validation.
So the IDE will take care of all the simple validations.
But for the complex business logic and validations, we need to write our own code which will be used for validation purpose.
Testing of LightSwitch Applications:
The most desired feature is testing the application.
As when we work in the previous versions of Visual Studio and if we need some changes in UI part then we need to stop the application and then change it. After changing, again we need to run it.
So the changes can't be done while running the application. But here in the LightSwitch business applications, there is no need to stop the applications. We can directly change the UI of our application in the running mode.
We can provide the permission and based on the permissions we can test the whole application.
Deployment of LightSwitch applications:
Deployment is same for LightSwitch similar to previous versions of Visual Studio applications.
We can use Click Once deployment to deploy our LightSwitch application.
Prerequisites to work with Visual Studio 2011:
1. Supporting OS – It supports almost all the OS which are latest and came after Windows XP SP3
2. Hardware Requirements –
- Processor with min 1.66GHz
- RAM (1GB, recommended 1.5 GB)
- Hard Disk space 3 GB(recommended) with 5400 RPM
- DirectX 9 capable video card for high resolution display.Note: You must install Visual Studio 2010 SP1 before the installation of Visual Studio 2011.
Where/How to Find the Trail Version?:
The link to download the trail version of visual Studio 2011:
Download Visual Studio 2011 Light Switch
At this link, we can get the 90 days trial version of visual studio 2011.
This was the introductory part of Visual studio LightSwitch 2011. Hope you will enjoy it…