LightSwitch, Microsoft's New Visual Programming Tool for Web Development
Microsoft once again proves itself a leader in the web development world by introducing yet again a lovely tool for web developers called LightSwitch.
Online, August 7, 2010 (Newswire.com) - At a conference on Visual Studio campus, Redmond, Washington Microsoft announced the introduction of LightSwitch codenamed Kitty Hawk as the newest addition to the Visual Studio family of web development tools. It uses .Net development platform at its base and is targeted for small and big businesses. Microsoft has introduced LightSwitch with the objective to reduce the distance between full feature .Net web application development and other makeshift applications built using Access, Excel and SharePoint.
Numerous people had all praises for LightSwitch as Microsoft's Orville McDonald showed a demo which clearly exposed how it can organize all repetitive and annoying tasks of web development for a web developer. Zander from Visual Studio also displayed how developers from a web development company can quickly merge together distant sources of data in an web application including a cloud based SQL Azure database, a remote SharePoint list and local database using LightSwitch. He further concluded that the beta version of Visual Studio LightSwitch would be available for download from August 23 onwards on MSDN.
Some of the features of LightSwitch which a web development company can look forward to as discussed at the conference are as follows:
1) It has been designed keeping business utility at the center and presents traditional data types like money and phone numbers, email, in-field formatting and automated validation.
2) It gives web developers the ability to change deployment decisions of the web application even at the end of the process. That is an application developed for Windows can be deployed for Windows Azure, Windows Server, or a browser platform at the end.
3) Web developers irrespective of their skill level can use LightSwitch to develop applications for the browser, desktop or cloud.
It is a step further from Microsoft to make web development code free and appealing to business units. Since it is based on .Net web developers will be able to add new features to it using Visual Studio Pro.
More features on Lightswitch are expected to be explored as soon as web development experts will get the chance to experiment with the beta version.