On my way out I simply couldn’t resist one more job. Two things to know for context. He just spent a month setting up his office. Tweaking it. Adjusting it. Getting everything just right. Additionally, a week ago he came to work in a Visual Studio LightSwitch logo’ed polo shirt, which was very out of character for him. It turns out that he hadn’t done his laundry, and that was all that was left.

With this in mind I set out to “improve” his office set up and ensure he always had clean clothes to wear. (My accomplices shall remain nameless to protect the guilty).

Here are some photos of the final result (sorry, forgot to take “before” photos):

First we removed all the THREE desks he had (which required cutting 1.5 cable locks before resorting to disassembling the desks completely), leaving behind only a bookshelf and a couple portable drawer units. The bookshelf became the desk, and one drawer unit became a side table while the other will be used as a chair.

The desk is efficient although crowded.

Since we aren’t barbaric we ensured to leave his scotch and a copy of The Economist.

To ensure he would not go without a wardrobe, I supplied him with a full stock of the very logo’ed shirt he wore to work

Finally, we established some working guidelines for how to dress throughout the week.

Now don’t think we are too cruel. This is all in the spirit of good fun and life at Microsoft. Plus, he had an idea something was up when he left for vacation the night BEFORE my last day at Microsoft (who does that!), as proven by the note he left on his desk (now proudly on display in his window).

I’ve had a wonderful run here at Microsoft. You’ll find me at www.dougseven.com from now on.

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Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 is immediately available for MSDN Subscribers, and will be available for everyone on March 17, 2011.

What’s New in LightSwitch Beta 2

• Publish to Azure
  The Publish Wizard now provides the ability to publish a LightSwitch desktop or browser application to Windows Azure, including the application’s database to SQL Azure.
• Improved runtime and design-time performance
  F5/build, project creation/load, application startup, calculated fields, and data load/save pipeline.
• Runtime UI improvements
  Auto-complete box, better keyboard navigation, and improved end-user experience for long-running operations.
• Allow any authenticated Window user
  When Windows authorization was selected in a LightSwitch app, you previously needed to add the Windows users who are allowed to use the application into the User Administration screen of the running application. This is cumbersome in installations where there are a large number of Windows users and when you just wanted to open the app up to all Windows users. The project properties UI now provides the ability to allow any Windows user to be authenticated in a LightSwitch application while still using the LightSwitch authorization subsystem for determining user permissions for specific users.

What Can I Do With LightSwitch?

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you’re an event management professional who has some experience with Visual Basic (a college course, or some hobbyist dabbling), and you have a need for an application to help manage a series of road shows you are planning. Visual Studio LightSwitch simplifies the process of building this application, and with the addition of support for Windows Azure in Beta 2, deployment is simplified as well.

Step 1: Create a LightSwitch Project

The first question you are asked when creating a new LightSwitch project, is which programming language you prefer. If this question intimidates you, then LightSwitch is not for you (if you want a tool for building business applications without any coding, consider Microsoft Office Access 2010).

For this example I will choose Visual Basic.

Step 2 : Define the data you’re tracking

The first screen I am prompted with once my project is creates asks me to either create a new data table, or connect to an existing data table. I can connect to SQL Server, SQL Azure, SharePoint, or any data source wrapped with a WCF RIA Service. For now I’ll create a new table.

The first data I need to keep track of is the actual Road Show Events – the title, description, start date, end date, website for the event, and the venue (name and address). I simply describe these attributes and their type (e.g. string, or Date/Time, etc.).

Step 3: Create the screens you need for the data

With the first table created I can move on to defining the screens I need in order to use this data. There are really only a few types of screens I need, and these are all readily available as templates in LightSwitch.

The action bar at the top of the design surface has a button to create a new screen (this button is only available when viewing a data table).

I’m prompted to choose one of five screen types: Details, Editable Grid, List and Details, New Data and Search screens.

I’ll start by creating an Search screen, and without making any changes, add another screen, a New Data screen.

Now I have one table and two screens. Without doing anything else, I’m going to run the application to see what it does.

What I have is a basic line-of-business application that enables me to enter Road Show Event data, and search the results. Not a lot, but I got here in minutes.

I am still technically in design mode, so any data I enter may be deleted as I make changes to the application. Typically this will only happen if I change the table definitions and LightSwitch needs to drop the database and recreate it. In other words, don’t spend a lot of time entering data yet.

That said, you can enter some data to see how the application works. One thing you’ll quickly discover is that the application is aware of the data types that I defined in Step 2 and is rendering controls that are appropriate to those types. For example, I chose DateTime as the type for StartDate and EndDate. As such, those fields have controls that help me select a date and time.

After I enter the data, I simply click Save and the record is committed to the database.

If I return to the Search screen and  click Refresh I can see the record I just entered.

At any time I can click the Export to Excel button to export the search results to an Excel workbook.

Step 4: Repeat Steps 2 & 3 for all the data you are tracking

Now that I have a running application, I can simply repeat steps 2 and 3 to add more data and screens. For example, I may want to track sessions and speakers for each road show.

A session has a title, description, a speaker and it belongs to a Road Show Event. A Speaker is more interesting – I may want to track first name, last name, email address cell phone number and an optional biography. As I do this, I want to ensure that each email address entered in unique. This will help ensure that I don’t enter duplicate speakers.

Notice that I’ve unchecked the Required field for Bio.

In order to ensure a unique email address I simply check the Include in Unique Index option in the Properties window.

After I’ve created the Speakers table, I create the Sessions table, and define the relationship between Speakers, Sessions and Road Show Events.

I’ll define two relationships:

• A Session must have one Speaker, but one Speaker can have many Sessions.
  
  
• A Session must have one Road Show Event, but one Road Show Event can have many Sessions.
  

My Sessions table now looks like this:

Finally, I’ll add Search and New Data screens for these two new tables. When I add the New Data screen for Speaker, a new option is available to me. The ability to add related data for the new speaker – their sessions.

I’ll enable this option by checking the Speaker Sessions checkbox. The resulting screen designer shows me that I have two rows of controls (this is identified by the Rows Layout node at the top).

1. The top row is the Speaker details, and uses a column layout (identified by the Column Layout node). This shapes this top row as having two columns.
2. The second row is Session details for this speaker and uses a grid layout (defined by the Data Grid node).

The resulting screen will look like this:

Now I can run the application and add some more sample data to test the application. All of the new screens have been added ot the Task navigation on the left-hand side of the application.

Notice the business type validation I get when adding a new Speaker – Email Address and Phone have input validation already wired up.

Since I added the related data capabilities to this screen, I can also enter the sessions that my new Speaker will be delivering, and using a drop-down list, select the Road Show Event this session will be given at.

In addition, I get the unique email address validation as well.If I try to save a new Speaker using the same email address as an already added Speaker, I get an error message without having to do any additional work.

Finally, I’ll add one more screen – a List and Details screen that will show me a list of Road Show Events, and their Sessions.

When I run the application I get a new, compelling view of my data. On the left is a list of Road Show Events. On the right is two rows of data.

1. The top row is the Road Show Event details (in an editable form).
2. The lower row is a grid of sessions associated with this event.

Using the grid controls I can actually Add, Edit and Delete Road Show Event and Sessions for this Road Show Event right from this view.

Summary

Visual Studio LightSwitch is the simplest way to create business applications for the desktop and cloud. In this blog post you saw how you can quickly build a business application to support your unique business needs, without the need for professional developer resources. In a couple days I’ll be blogging about how you can further customize a LightSwitch application as a business developer, and how you can deploy the application to Windows, Windows Server and Windows Azure. Over the next few months I’ll be blogging about how these applications can be transitioned to IT for ongoing management and maintenance, and what that means to IT.

Go and try out Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 and let us know what you think.

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On his blog yesterday, Soma (Sr. VP of Developer Division at Microsoft), announced that Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 will be coming soon. I can tell you, we are really excited about LightSwitch, and apparently you are too (you’ve downloaded over 100,000 copies of Beta 1).

One question that comes up a lot is, what can LightSwitch do versus what can Visual Studio Professional do? What’s the difference? Well, the difference is pretty clear.

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a specialist tool for building line-of-business applications for the desktop and cloud, while Visual Studio Professional is a generalist tool for building anything you can imagine for Microsoft's platforms.

Take a look at this feature matrix and you’ll see what I mean (we’ll get a formal version of this up on www.microsoft.com/lightswitch soon).

1 Only available for LightSwitch applications. Requires Visual Studio LightSwitch and Visual Studio Professional to both be installed.
2 Team Explorer will integrate with LightSwitch but must be installed separately.
3 Requires a Team Foundation Server Client Access License (CAL).

I hope that helps!

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Question: In a Visual Studio LightSwitch application, where is the connection string to the database being stored?

LightSwitch applications can work with several types of data, including “local” application data, external SQL Server or SQL Azure data (or any other database supported by the .NET Framework), SharePoint data, and other external data exposed through WCF RIA Services. If you choose to get data from an external source, the Attach Data Source Wizard shows you your options.

This blog has moved to www.dougseven.com/blog – you can read this post at www.dougseven.com/blog/2010/08/data-storage-in-visual-studio-lightswitch.html.

This is exciting for us – we’ve been working on this product in secret for some time now. Finally we are able to share this work with the world.

Of course, as can often happen, the announcement was followed up with some confusion. Since we aren’t releasing the Beta 1 bits until August 23, 2010, no one (other than the 700 people at VSLive using the hands-on-labs) can actually see LightSwitch in action and get a feel for it. As a result, there is some confusion around what LightSwitch is, what it does, and who should use it. So let me try and dispel a few myths.

Who is LightSwitch for? Who should use it?

LightSwitch is intended for anyone who needs to…

This post can be read on www.dougseven.com/blog/2010/08/myth-busting-visual-studio-lightswitch.html

I promise more to come, including some demos. In the meantime, check out Jay Schmelzer’s The Anatomy of a LightSwitch Application Series.

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You can download the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 from the Visual Studio Gallery. To learn more about the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template, see the Process Templates and Tools blog.

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Sandboxed-compatible Visual Web Part
This item template enables you to use a visual designer to create SharePoint web parts that can be deployed in a SharePoint 2010 sandboxed solution.

Sandboxed Compilation
This extension displays build errors when you use types or members in a SharePoint 2010 sandboxed project which are not allowed in the SharePoint sandbox environment.

The Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools are available immediately on the Visual Studio Gallery.

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IT administrators using WSUS will have a slightly different experience. .NET Framework 4 will be optional on all the above OSs, while .NET Framework 4 Client Profile will be optional on XP and recommended on Vista and Windows 7.

There is an article that describes how to temporarily block the installation of the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. You might have to do this in an environment in which the Automatic Updates feature is enabled on a computer that is running Windows Vista or on a computer that is running Windows 7. See KB support.microsoft.com/kb/982320

Important: We recommend that you do not block the installation of the .NET Framework 4. However, if you have a compelling business reason to do this temporarily in environments where the Automatic Updates feature is enabled, you can modify the registry to temporarily block the installation of the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile.

Cheap beer and lousy pizza (with a New Orleans twist)

We are bringing back GeekFest! Join us at Pat O’Brien’s for a night of gumbo, beer and hurricanes. There are limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2010 conference and you are a developer, you are invited. To register pick up your "duck" ticket (and wristband) in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (DEV) information desk.

You must have wristband to get in.

Tuesday, June 8^th from 8pm – 11pm
Pat O’Brien’s New Orleans
624 Bourbon Street New Orleans, LA 70130

In this four part series my goal is to provide you a look at Visual Studio 2010 and highlight how you can use it to improve many aspects of your team-based software development—from planning to coding to testing. While this is not a comprehensive dive into everything Visual Studio 2010 can do, it does give you a glimpse into the power of Visual Studio 2010. Even though I take a team focus with this series, a lot of what I discuss can be used by individual developers as well.

In Part 2 I am focusing on the challenges of existing code and how you can better understand existing systems by creating visualizations of the code. From there I will focus on how you can use tools to discover emerging designs, and maintain architectural integrity as you implement new parts of the system.

<snip> This post can be viewed in its entirety at DougSeven.com. </snip>

Understanding existing code and controlling code complexity is critical. Once a software project’s complexity gets out-of-hand, it becomes fragile and difficult to maintain. Using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate enables you to quickly visualize existing code with DGML diagrams and Architecture Explorer, discover emerging designs and dependencies with the Layer Diagram, and maintain architectural integrity by incorporating the Layer Diagram validation into a gated check-in process.

In Part 3 I will look at how Visual Studio 2010 will help you eliminate bugs.

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