Microsoft Lightswitch

[sttottle]

Hi,

Apologies if i have put this question in the wrong topic, this is my first post and don't want to get off to a bad start...

I'm looking into LightSwitch as Rapid Application Development solution in our company.

We have VB and C# programmers already using Visual Studio 2010, but we also have MS Access and Excel VBA 'programmers' who i feel might get on better with LightSwitch and therefore be able to develop web applications that can also be used on our Macs and mobile devices that can use our existing SQL back-end infrastructure (and remove these small islands of data)?

Does anyone have any links to information about LightSwitch or personal accounts they don't mind sharing?

Thanks in advance, i've had a Google already and have read some reviews, but they are a little old and i'd like to get some real world examples.

[sttottle]

Hello again, just some more information I have found out

From what I understand, the next LightSwitch release (at the moment is LightSwitch HTML Client Preview 2) for Visual Studio 2012 will publish using HTML5 and not Silverlight (and therefore solve the cross platform issue).

The problem I have with the HTML Client Preview is that it's only available in VS2012 which isn't cheap whereas Excel comes as standard on all our PC's, but creates unmanageable islands of data.

If the next release of LightSwitch Published in HTML5 and had a stand alone IDE (or could be used with VS Express editions), I think it might be a winner (it appears to be ~ $300 ????).

Please correct me on the above if anything is incorrect and does anyone know more about the next release and any real world experiences?

[LegendaryRamzi]

I have some experience with the Silverlight version, I can't help with the HTML version.

Just like any other framework:

-You need to do common stuff: Very easy.

-You need to do complicated stuff: Near impossible.

The advantage of Lightswitch is that you won't have to spend time with developing your framework:

webservices, authentication, layout/navigation, usermanagement, ...

You can immediately start making the stuff you need. You will have basic functionality running in a very short time.

The biggest problem I have with lightswitch is that the application interface is stored in 1 single file.

This makes it very hard to work on it with multiple developers.

It also depends how far you want to go with this application.

If it's going to be a huge project don't go with lightswitch.

If you just need a simple business application, it's a good fit.