LightSwitch

Introduction to Visual Studio LightSwitch

Ref: LightSwitch.

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch helps you solve specific business needs by enabling you to quickly create professional-quality business applications, regardless of your development skills. LightSwitch is a new addition to the Visual Studio family. Visual Studio LightSwitch is designed to simplify and shorten the development of typical forms-over-data business applications.

Most business applications have a large code base dedicated to addressing operations that create, read, update and delete elements (CRUD). Typically, in this kind of application, a large amount of time is spent on the following development tasks:

• Writing code to interact with a data source.
• Creating a User Interface.
• Writing code to specify the business logic.

With LightSwitch, you can use databases which are automatically created or point to an existing data source without the need to write code. To help with the User Interface, LightSwitch provides Screens that are based on predefined templates and display data automatically by simply specifying which elements you want to show.
Regarding the business logic, simple validation such as required fields and minimum numeric values can be handled through a designer. LightSwitch also gives developers the ability to write more complex business logic code for various scenarios, such as saving changes to a data source or performing authorization operations.