Visual Studio LightSwitch, Beta 1 (x86) - DVD

Wow!
LightSwitch beta1 finally available for download for msdn subscribers... 507MB download, no key required.

LightSwitch Installation

 
There is nothing currently to “Customize”…

… even the installation folder is fixed if you have vs2010 already installed!

The installation process should not take that long…

… and when done you get the “funny” for a developer option to run the app:-)

LightSwitch first run

Same splash screen as vs2010, no surprise since it runs integrated.

Under the LightSwitch templates you can choose your preferred programming language.

LightSwitch is truly data driven so the first thing  that you need to take care of is connect to some data. For those of us you like to think objects first this might be a bit of frustrating!

Let’s create a new table, a “Customer” table. Use singular case here. why? Well behind the scenes there must be entity framework somewhere!

OK, we’ve got data now let’s make a screen to enter new records.

There is a hand full of commonly used data driven screen templates. Let’s hope there will be a possibility to extend these.

The user interface designer look pretty much like the good old Oracle Forms designer looked… only it’s much nicer:-) I hope there is a possibility to alter the wpf styles behind the scenes…

So let’s start the app hitting F5 =>
You get the lightswitch wcf server host up and running…

And this is how our first app looks like… not bad for the amount of work that we have invested.

LightSwitch first thoughts

• I took a quick look at the solution folder and I was very surprised: the simple app we created before needs over 70MB in disk!!!
• The project files are of course MsBuild project files like all other visual studio projects. They have reserved the *.lsproj extension.
• The structure of the solution needs some studying, it’s not what you would expect for any other project.
• Is MS Access dead? If I wanted to do something with access I would definitely consider LightSwitch.
• Integration with source controls (at least SVN, HG and TFS) seems to be ok.
• Would the LightSwitch environment support a large team? I am a bit skeptical here.