[AdamSpeight2008]

Quote

THE SIMPLEST WAY TO BUILD BUSINESS APPLICATIONS FOR THE DESKTOP AND CLOUD

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta helps you solve specific business needs by enabling you to quickly create professional-quality business applications, regardless of your development skills. LightSwitch is a new addition to the Visual Studio family. Visit this page often to learn more about this exciting product.

Microsoft Lightswitch


My Thoughts
It is a interesting area to target but it may cause a few problems later down the line.

[Bacanze]

It's what I thought it would be, MS dummying application development via wizards, but I guess its quicker/more convenient. Just don't like emphasis on look how much you don't need to know, everyone can do it. Kind of reminds me of the way web design went just as I start, one minute creating sites is a good proffession, respected, next minute everyone including your grandma can create a website urgh.

/endrant

Yeah, I'm bias, some people might really like this and find it useful.

[eclipsed4utoo]

To me, this is Access and FrontPage all over again. Does this industry really need people developing apps who don't know what they are doing? If developing applications were easy, everybody would be doing it already. There are plenty of tools currently available for people to do development. The problem is the mindset. Most people just don't have the problem-solving skills that professional developers have. Anybody can throw images and text on a website and say, "Look...I made a website". It takes a different kind of person to develop an application.

I saw a tweet that summed this up for me(actually a number of really good tweets)....

LightSwitch is "Visual Studio for Dummies". Now that may be harsh, but in my opinion, that's what it is.

But, on the bright side, I guess it helps with job security. It will only be a matter of time before we are hired to migrate LightSwitch applications just as we migrate Access applications to .Net.

[Sergio Tapia]

Completely agree with you, eclipsed. However, just like Microsoft Access or Frontpage, I'm sure it'll have its place.

[Frinavale]

I would have watched the keynote on the topic but every time I try to watch their videos my browser chugs or crashes. It might be because of Internet issues that have been persisting for the last few days...or it might be because who ever is hosting the videos doesn't have anything server side that helps with buffering etc.... or it could just be SilverLight crashing (in IE and FireFox)

I don't know how thrilled I am about this product (mind you I've just been reading reviews and blogs about it's introduction). It makes me a bit apprehensive to the types of questions I can see flooding .NET forums in the foreseeable future. Providing non-developers with developer tools and hiding functionality ....

Well sounds great to get up and running but sounds like a nightmare to fix and we all know who they're going to be running-to to get fixes.

-Frinny

This post has been edited by Frinavale: 06 August 2010 - 10:12 AM

[lukebrewerton]

This seems very similar to the DevExpress eXpressApp Framework, darg and drop and hey presto, one app created in minutes! although, the DevExpess one does require a fair bit of .NET knowledge to make anything vaguely usable in it as the base classes are a bit crap for anything other than the 'Outlook' demo it ships with!

[codyH]

I just saw a presentation on this software this weekend. There are some significant issues attached to poor development as we all know. However, this can be a good mock-up/prototype demonstrator that a non programmer can use to show their needs to their (hopefully existing) software department. Regardless of ones feelings about other departments/companies if it encourages computer science and development it should at least be explored.

[Core]

It was stated multiple times that this tool is in no way oriented to professional developers, but rather power users with minimal development experience. I don't think we'll see many commercial products being created with LightSwitch, but at the same time it allows rapid development for automating some tasks inside a company/organization.

[Adkins]

I think this could actually prove useful to schools as an introduction to programming class. I know some people that were scared away from those classes cause they are always an introduction to Java, C#, C++, or on one occasion C. They are not an introduction to some of the base ideas of programming, because it is so hard to teach those concepts without a language attached. This dumbed down version just might work for just such a class. A way to give a student a chance to try it out without overwhelming them with syntax.

[milleja46]

Wow, from what i've seen i'll never try this, it seems like the non-programmers way out if you look at it, plus when you have the right tools like visual studio why get lightswitch? It's just not a great move on microsoft's side, it'll fall through soon enough because of the problems that will be caused in it...