Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is a development environment designed to simplify and shorten the development of typical forms-over-data applications for businesses. Regardless of your development skills—whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer—LightSwitch enables you to quickly create professional-quality business applications. And you can do so without writing a line of code.

In most business applications, developers spend a large amount of time:

·         Writing code to interact with a data source

·         Creating a user interface

·         Writing code to specify the business logic

With LightSwitch, your application can point to an existing data source—or databases that are automatically created—without the need to write code. For the user interface, LightSwitch provides screens that are based on predefined templates. They allow you to display data automatically by simply specifying which elements you want to show.

For the business logic, LightSwitch allows you to do simple validation such as required fields and minimum numeric values. But LightSwitch also gives developers the ability to write more complex business logic code for such scenarios as saving changes to a data source or performing authorization operations.

Setting up LightSwitch Enviornment:

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 1 is a flexible, business application development tool that allows developers of all skill levels to quickly build and deploy professional-quality desktop and Web business applications.

To start with LightSwitch application development, you need to install the Visual Studio LightSwitch in your development machine. To do so, follow the below steps:

·         Install Visual Studio 2010

·         Install Visual Studio LightSwitch

The LightSwitch installation will install all other components to your PC one by one including SQL Express, Silverlight 4, LightSwitch Beta server etc.

There are some steps through which you can create your first lightswitch application; steps are as follows:

1.       Creating a LightSwitch Project:

2.       Create a Database Table

3.       Create a Data Entry Screen

4.       Validation on Fields

5.       Customize the Screen