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.

LightSwitch in Depth:

LightSwitch applications are built on classic three-tier architecture (UI, BAL, DAL), on top of existing .NET technologies. The LightSwitch presentation tier (User Interface tier) is a Silverlight application. It can run as a Windows desktop application or hosted in a browser. The LightSwitch logic (Business logic layer) tier exposes a set of WCF RIA DomainServices running in ASP.NET. The logic tier process can be hosted locally (on the user’s machine), on an IIS server, or in Windows Azure.

A LightSwitch application’s primary application storage uses SQL Server or SQL Azure and can consume data from existing SharePoint 2010 lists, databases accessible via an Entity Framework provider, and custom build WCF RIA DomainServices.

Beginning LightSwitch:

Are you completely new to LightSwitch and software development? Get started building an Address Book application with these Beginning LightSwitch topics.

·         What’s in a Table? Describing Your Data

·         Defining Data Relationships

·         Screen Templates, Which One Do I Choose?

·         Sorting and Filtering Data with Queries

·         Controlling Access with User Permissions

·         Customizing the "Look and Feel" with Themes

There are the some essential topics too which are more necessary to develop a full featured business application with visual studio lightswitch such as:

·         Working with Data

·         Working with Screens

·         Working with Queries

·         Working with Code

·         Working with User Permission

·         Working with Office

·         Deploying LightSwitch Applications