LightSwitch

Is this something that just died, or is it still undergoing active development?

-Josh

They have an estimated  release date yet but they working on Beta 2. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/lightswitchgeneral/thread/37e20f92-f94f-4fd9-a383-fbc5cd371d31

So, it's still under active developement.

Under development and a bunch of folks want to see it finished.

but we are also making jokes about when we will see a new beta....

has a lot of posiblity but the team has a lot to do to make it work.

at least the blog of Beth Massi is very active  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bethmassi/

@felix9: I saw that and thought to myself "what are they doing?" I would have thought something like LightSwitch would have gone through at least four betas followed by a few RCs. However, here we are six months later with not one update. When I first started poking around, the performance was so bad that I told myself that I wouldn't touch it until beta 3 rolls around. Well, I hope the performance issues are addressed before version 1.0 is released.

-Josh

@JoshRoss: Unless it is Silverlight (with a long term strategy of Windows Phone), Microsoft are very very slow when they do their "out of band" releases.

I am a full time WPF developer, and the last time the WPF toolkit was updated was a year ago (juxtaposed to Silverlight). The MS WPF charts are looking to join the Ribbon in taking 2 years plus for controls (not Visual studio) to be available, it's ridiculous!

I hope the delay is in getting things right, as opposed to a slow development cycle. I am working with third party conrols heavily at present that are updated frequently, and each time an update comes, things break, and new bugs emerge.

I have come to appreciate the Microsoft way of developing a toolset, and releasing it periodically, rather than Burger King speed updates.

@vesuvius: Windows 7, arguably the largest project to date, had several and frequent releases prior to RTM. I'll agree with you that having frequent updates that break dependancies is not good.

But, I feel releasing a preview, with the parts that work, and then later another release, with the previously omitted features, would be the best way to go.

-Josh

8 hours ago, Charles wrote

We'll find out what's going on. I suspect they are working on the next public release....

C

from what i have seen in the LS forum a new release is on it's way soon. 

I think they saw with B1 that they have like a million folks who want 20 different things all done now in V1 of this new product and they have been going nuts behind the door to try and make as many folks happy as possible and still ship a V1 before the end of 2012.

I suspect they did not see just how hot this tool could be when they first let it out.

I don't get what this is trying to accomplish, is it some kind of MS Access competitor?

@Bass: I get the sense it is targeted at businesses who currently do everything in house with spreadsheets and MS Access.

9 hours ago, Bass wrote

I don't get what this is trying to accomplish, is it some kind of MS Access competitor?

not exactly.....

but in some ways it can be like that....

for many cases a business needs to manage data that is specific to that business, they need the basic CRUD forms to work and they need someone who knows about what they do to then add the bits that speak to what they do - say it's a Dr. and they need to view x-rays and some other medical data for example.

the idea is that the people using LS do not have to spend all the time just getting the basic CRUD stuff up and working , get the special bits done and the app done faster and with less time testing and debugging the really common basic stuff, spend more time getting it right for that business.

and that you can be expert on the business needs and not need a huge number of developers to get a small to medium app done for them.

thats some of what it's about... and a lot of folks see other things that the LS team were not even targeting ...  like admin tools to edit stuff in a large system. and can we use LS to generate parts of a system for us when we are advanced developers.

@figuerres: I guess you could say that this was an 'Enterprise' version of the Access UI builders; except it's much more sophisticated and build with current, better technology.

The basic concept for creating a UI is the same as Access, but with much more capacity for customising and for the addition of more complex business logic.

And it uses full relational databases or web services and not just a local Access database (although I expect you could get it to run on Access it you were some sort of masochist).

Herbie

I was wondering about the status of this too. It would be great for throwing together a quick app that just needs basic CRUD operations.

1 hour ago, funkyonex wrote

Hi Guys, Although I can't tell you the release date I want to assure you we are working hard on releasing Beta 2! We have a very active forum, blog and developer center. I am personally producing more videos and articles and we'll have a bunch of new content for Beta 2. We also were just featured in CoDe Magazine's March/April issue.

 

Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lightswitch/
Forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/vslightswitch
Dev Center: http://msdn.com/lightswitch

 

Cheers,

-Beth Massi

Beth, what I have found to be a problem is the way many of us have given feedback in connect and on the fourm that seems to go nowhere.  a number of items have been marked as out of scope or are just sitting in connect with no update to say they will or will not be done. 

I just commented on a post inn the LS forum where Ben said he stopped giving feedback for this reason.  I have also been in a "tell me when it's done, then i will take a new look"

this is *NOT* my normal attitude on a beta that has the possibility of this one.

the team's public voice in connect and in the forums *HAS* turned some of us off.

3 hours ago, funkyonex wrote

Hi Guys, Although I can't tell you the release date I want to assure you we are working hard on releasing Beta 2! We have a very active forum, blog and developer center. I am personally producing more videos and articles and we'll have a bunch of new content for Beta 2. We also were just featured in CoDe Magazine's March/April issue.

 

Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lightswitch/
Forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/vslightswitch
Dev Center: http://msdn.com/lightswitch

 

Cheers,

-Beth Massi

here is an example of one post i made in connect:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/590459/lightswitch-missing-datatypes-to-please-add

we have 33 votes on this and no reply from MSFT staff on what if anything will be done with this feedback.

if any part of this is going to be done it would be usefull for MSFT staff to take a minute and tell us if it will make it into V1 and has been accepted.

if not then why not?

just leaving it sitting there makes us think it's been ignored.

also:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/590689/lightswitch-sql-server-options

and we have all been asking for something better here:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/587990/printing-support-in-lightswitch

and with that marked as "closed by design" makes us very worried about how we will build a really good app w/o a good reporting system..... 

export to word and excell are good things to have but will not replace a real report system.

and the current state of Silverlight and SQL RS is not good at all for a LOB app.