First of all, WOW!
I had heard about LightSwitch, but I always got that same vibe as I am sure everyone else did – that it was a bit of a “toy”. I never really got into the whole Silverlight LOB thing, so I did not really think tweice about LightSwitch. Plus the whole sepearate download thing…
As Michael Washington said in an interview when asked if LightSwitch was a bit too basic for the “hard core” developer:
It’s in Visual Studio, so if you aren’t already a person who would open up Visual Studio it is not the product for you.
That pretty much puts things into perspective.
I needed a reporting solution, and I wanted something fast and simple. I know I cannot give a report builder to a marketing person and say, “have at it!” They won’t understand the db schema, and I would just wind up building the report myself. I decided it was the right time to give LightSwitch a go, and man am I impressed!
With Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, LightSwitch 3 was released. Included in LightSwitch 3 is the ability to create HTML5 clients. It is pretty darned awesome! LightSwitch makes getting started simple, but if you want to dive-deep you can. I was able to take our db and throw together a couple of sample reports in minutes. I even made a couple more while demoing LightSwitch for my peers – it is just drop-dead simple. However, don’t let the simplicity fool you – there are plenty of hooks to get in deep.
LightSwitch uses jQuery mobile, so it can use all the cool jQuery stuff out there. Wijmo is building LightSwitch-specific implementations of their widgets that should be in beta soon, but you could just use the current Wijmo widgets with a little elbow grease.
I am so stoked to get to using LightSwitch. I was dreading making these reports, but now I am actually excited. It will be so easy to make them that it will actually be fun. Whodathunkit?
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