Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 : Introduction

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 is a flexible business application development tool that can be used with Visual Studio 2010 IDE. It gives you a simplified development environment which give the capability to create CRUD based business applications within few minutes.

Typical business application manage data through user interfaces, provide search facilities and provide data validations. Usually, if you want to create a business applications you have to develop the user interfaces, write codes for interactions with data sources, along with the most critical business logic. But with Visual Studio LightSwitch, you can omit the first two and concentrate only about the business logic.


Features of LightSwitch

• You can built your applications which can be deployed on Desktop, Web or Cloud. It lets you decide on a deployment method after your application is built.
• You can download and use “Starter Kits” (pre-built application shells) to get more professional look and feel with less coding.
• LightSwitch includes templates for the most common types of business applications. It also contains predefined data types for commonly used fields, like phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
• LightSwitch has built-in authentication models which make it easy to provide
  different users with varying degrees of access and authorization. Further more, LightSwitch automatically generates the administration console, an easy way to set user roles and permissions.
• Most of the extensions you may require are built into LightSwitch. For an example custom extensions such as Money and Phone Number business types are included in LightSwitch.

LighSwitch Designer : Appears when create a new project

Downloading LightSwitch
To try out the features and the capabilities of LightSwitch you can download the 90 day trial version of the product. If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can get the LightSwitch for free.

Download : Visual Studio LightSwitch - Web Installer

Prerequisites
You have to check the following before installing Visual Studio Lightswitch in your machine.

• If your Visual Studio version is, ‘Visual Studio 2010 Professional’ or higher, LightSwitch will automatically integrate with existing  IDE. Other wise it will install a new Visual Studio light switch development environment.
  
• You need to have Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1.
  
• You have to remove any beta versions of the LightSwitch from your computer.

When you complete the installation, You may find the LightSwitch projects under the ‘installed templates’ of of your Visual Studio when you try to create a new project.

So, that was about what is LightSwitch, where to download and how to install it on your machine. Meet you in another post!