Microsoft has announced a new addition to the Visual Studio family of tools and products. LightSwitch is meant to give powerusers and IT Pros who don’t want to get into C# programming the power to quickly create business applications.
The beta is announced to be available from Monday, 23 August 2010 for download. We will for sure have a look at it. From what I’ve read so far it sounds like filling a niche:
- Application creation without programming: People who have tasks to do, who need to produce results, who have technical understanding, but don’t want to get too deep into programming (C# and the like) seem to be getting a powerful tool.
- Tool to get the job done: So far these people mostly would use Access or Excel with VBA to get the job done – a pain to migrate and in a corporate environment usually tough to maintain as the person who created the code might have been gone by the time of the next update.
- Distribution & Release Management: The application built with LightSwitch can easily be distributed. Solutions based on Excel, Access or maybe SharePoint Designer are much more difficult to distribute and maintain – with an application if there is an update, you update the application; with Excel and Access if there is an update you also need to make sure the data connections and data in the spreadsheets work. Working with SharePoint Designer usually means doing the work on a life site.
So I’m curious to see if Microsoft can accomplish what Borland unfortunately gave up many years ago when they stopped ObjectVision.
eweek article Application Development: Microsoft LightSwitch: 15 Reasons Non-Programmers Should Try It Out.
Microsoft’s LightSwitch center
LightSwitch Developer Center
