“Coming Soon”– Visual Studio LightSwitch

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A new version of Visual Studio called “LightSwitch” was announced at the VS Live conference today by Jason Zander.

At the moment, I don’t have any deep details to write about here but the essence is around a productive tool for building business applications with Silverlight for both the browser and the desktop which takes in cloud options as well.

It’s not necessarily targeted at every developer who’s building applications with .NET or Silverlight and undoubtedly there’s bound to be trade-offs that you make between [productivity/control] just as there are every time you adopt a [framework/toolset] but I think that this is a really interesting addition to Visual Studio.

It’s great to see Silverlight being used as the front-end here and ( as others have said ) in some ways the demos I’ve seen so far have a slight flavour of how Access was used to put together an app on top of a SQL store.

However, with the front end being Silverlight I can expect to run that cross-browser, cross-platform and in or out of the browser and, from the announcements, it looks like having SQL, SharePoint or SQL Azure data storage are key scenarios so I’ll perhaps ditch the “Access comparison” at that point Smile 

Either way – the best way to work it all out will be to try it out and, with that in mind, there’s a beta coming later in the month.

In the meantime, to get a few more details I’ve found ( in descending order from more detail to less detail );