LightSwitch Article Index

The number of LightSwitch articles on my blog is starting to grow. This landing “page” should provide you an easy reference to all the articles I have published about LightSwitch.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 (Beta) LightSwitch

• 8 Ways to Reporting and Printing Success – Mitigate any of this niggly reporting and printing issues.
• Consuming OData – Integrating Open Data protocol data into your LightSwitch solution.
• A First Class Citizen – Visual Studio 2011 now includes LightSwitch!

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011

• Granular Reference Data – Reference data using Reference data.
• Data First – Taking a data-centric approach to LightSwitch development.
• A Little Productivity – A free downloadable starter kit to bootstrap your LightSwitch development.
• The Citizen Developer – Championing the cause of the latent programmer.
• Primary Child Entity – A technique for defining a primary child entity.
• Application Defaults – Loading default data on deployment.
• Book Review – Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Business Application Development
• Multi-select Checklist – a call for help to enable a multi-select checklist control.
• Code Project Contest – my submission to the CodeProject LightSwitch Star contest
• What’s New – a small update on some of my recent projects.
• Beautiful Themes – a review of beautifully crafted themes from LightSwitchExtras.com.
• Business Analyst Perspective – an objective view of the LightSwitch value proposition.
• EDMUG Presentation – slide deck and takeaway notes from my Sept. 12, 2011 Edmonton .Net User Group presentation.
• RadRichTextBox - binding the RadRichTextBox control to a database.
• Interop to the Calculator – open the system Calculator using Interop.
• Custom Business Type – create a custom business type using the LightSwitch Extensibility Toolkit.
• Theme Resources – a growing list of resources for downloadable themes.
• How to Install a Theme – a step by step tutorial on how to install a theme.
• RTM Release - The official release of the RTM… yeah!

Beta 2 Release

• Top 10 Fundamentals – A list of top 10 fundamentals that newbie LightSwitch will benefit from understanding.
• Passing Parameters to Reports – Using the DevExpress XtraReports LightSwitch Extension with Parameters.
• Users as Lookup Lists – A WCF way of getting listings of users.
• Would You Like Fries With That? – What do you want in the release?
• Email from the Client Project- Sending emails from the client application.
• Telerik Reports – Using the Telerik Report Viewer via WCF in LightSwitch.
• Stakeholder Management – A simple stakeholder management architecture implemented with LightSwitch.
• Reference Tables with Relationships – Shows how to use tables for reference, or “lookup”, type information.
• Many-To-Many Relationships – An example implementation of a many-to-many table relationship.
• What is New in Beta 2 – A quick review and summary of what is new in Beta 2

Beta 1 Release

• How to Make Money with LightSwitch – A common sense view of what value LightSwitch will offer.
• oData and a Telerik RadMap – This was a fun showing oData source items as PinPoints on a Telerik RadMap.
• Consuming oData – A quickie on creating a simple WCF service used to proxy an oData data source.
• Send an Email from LightSwitch – Leverage the System.Net.Mail namespace to send an email from your LightSwitch application.
• Creating and Using a Query – Create better contextual data visualization using LightSwitch queries.
• Creating Table Relationships – A primer on relational database management systems and how to implement relationships in LightSwitch.
• Entity Field Custom Validation – This article shows you how to perform custom validation on an entity field.
• Computed Field Property – Create an entity field that displays a value that is computed.
• Customizing Field Properties – Use the LightSwitch designer to customize the presentation of your field and its data.
• Adding Telerik Controls – An example of how to use Telerik Silverlight controls in your LightSwitch application.
• Adding Custom Silverlight Controls – This article is actually a reference to a Michael Washington article at aDefWebServer.com.
• Customizing a Data Entity – Use the designer to customize a LightSwitch data entity.
• Solution Explorer Logical View and File View – Know when to switch between both views when developing a LightSwitch application.
• Quick Start – An example scenario where I create a quick, and dirty, LightSwitch application.
• First Use – An article illustrating what happened when I selected to create a LightSwitch application using Visual Studio 2010.
• My First #fail at the Beta 1 Installation – Just like the title says. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes:)
• Beta 1 Available for MSDN Subscribers – Where to download LightSwitch Beta 1

Before Beta 1 Release

• A Value Proposition for the Enterprise - A former Business Analyst’s take on what LightSwitch can bring to the table.
• CodeCast (Episode 88) Takeaway Notes – Some notes I took when listening to Jay Schmelzer on a CodeCast episode.
• A Data Driven Approach – Some notes and thoughts about how a data driven approach is used for developing LightSwitch applications.
• Beyond the Basics (Channel 9 Video) Takeaway Notes – More notes from an Channel9 video where Beth Massi interviews Joe Binder from the LightSwitch team.
• Behind the Pretty Face – A reiteration of an LightSwitch team blog article on the architecture behind LightSwitch.
• Visual Studio IDE – This is an article that examines the Visual Studio IDE used for designing LightSwitch applications.
• An Introduction – This is my first article which introduces LightSwitch.