A new product for developers from Microsoft is here: Visual Studio LightSwitch.
Visual Studio LightSwitch is designed to accelerate the production of data centric applications, those applications that are at the foundation of most business applications.
So how does this work?
A database can be created within Visual Studio LightSwitch itself or linked to from outside (using either a standard provider or a WCF RIA Service). LightSwitch itself will then generate an Entity framework based on the database objects.
Data entry and display screens can be created using predetermined templates with the Visual Studio LightSwitch environment, these can be created based on the database entities or queries built on top of these.
A basic data entry application can be created without the need to actually write any code, and more complex applications can be created with custom code added.
LightSwitch comes with a core set of controls and styles, this, however, is fully extendible using custom controls, themes and shells so you can fully customise the look and feel of your application. Microsoft have shown an “Extension Development Toolkit”, although this hasn’t been released yet and no official announcement regarding when this will be released has been made at this time, let us hope it comes with the LightSwitch release, as this will hugely simplify customisation.
A new version of Visual Studio is being released which contains just the LightSwitch environment to make it easier and cheaper for companies to develop within the new system, however, LightSwitch will also be available within the current editions of Visual Studio 2010 .