LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup- November 2013

A while back I started posting a monthly rollup of interesting community happenings, content, samples and extensions popping up around Visual Studio LightSwitch. If you missed those rollups you can check them all out here: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollups.

November was another exciting month with the Visual Studio Launch event and MVP summit taking place! We also continue to pump out the content, including more articles and samples this month. Read on…  

Visual Studio 2013 Launch

On November 13th, Visual Studio Launch events took place around the world with live streaming online from New York City. We also released a ton of on-demand videos from the product groups on all the new features in Visual Studio 2013.

Download Visual Studio 2013

Watch the Keynote: Transforming software development in a world of devices and services 

Skip to an hour and 30 minutes into the keynote and you’ll see Jay Schmelzer show LightSwitch in the new Cloud Business App project type. Also check out the videos Andy did that feature LightSwitch technology:

What's New in Visual Studio 2013 for ​LightSwitch Applications In this video, we will build and deploy from end-to-end, a full-featured business app that runs in Windows Azure and provides rich user experiences tailored for modern devices. We will also highlight some of the new features added to LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2013.

​Building Connected & Integrated Business Applications Using Office 365 Cloud Business App Project With Cloud Business App projects, Visual Studio 2013 streamlines the process of building modern business applications for Office 365. In this video, you will see how developers can build social, touch-centric, cross-platform SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 business applications that run well on all modern devices.

The new Cloud Business App project we introduced has some definite interest. It’s the second most watched video with over 87 thousand views! More than the keynote. Niiiiiiiiiice!

Cesar released the launch demo used to demonstrate LightSwitch and Cloud Business Apps that Jay showed off. You can download it here:  MyCompany STAFF demo application

You can also read more about what’s new in our announcement post: Visual Studio 2013 Released – Thank You LightSwitch Community! Also check out the updated content on the Visual Studio LightSwitch Developer Center.

MVP Summit – Nov 18-21

A lot of teams at Microsoft spend weeks preparing for the Global MVP Summit. The summit is an opportunity for the top Microsoft community experts to come to Redmond and engage face-to-face with the product teams and talk confidentially about our product directions and features we are working on. It’s a very busy, fun, crazy week.

You may recognize some of us in the photos below :-)

The team presented to many different MVP disciplines on all the awesome features that we are planning for the next release. They were all excited about the future of our products. Thank you MVPs for coming and giving us great feedback!

Michael Washington (in the third picture above – obviously excited about LightSwitch ;-)), and Jake Ginnivan (VSTO MVP, in the second photo) also manned a Visual Studio booth with me at the MVP showcase. We answered a ton of questions on all sorts of aspects of Visual Studio and showed off some sweet demos. Thanks guys for the help and fun!

Visual Studio LightSwitch Community Windows 8.1 App

In November Alessando Del Sole released a reader app for Windows 8.1 that aggregates all of the most popular LightSwitch community content. Awesome! You just made my monthly rollups a lot easier :-)

With this app you can stay up to date with new blog posts, videos, code examples, and IDE extensions for LightSwitch.

Download it here: Visual Studio LightSwitch Community

Beginning LightSwitch Series for Visual Studio 2013

I (re)-started a very popular beginner series for those of you just getting started with the LightSwitch. This time though, I’m focusing on the HTML client and Visual Studio 2013. I’m seeing a lot of folks are finding this helpful as they get started with the HTML client, even if they are familiar with the Silverlight client.

I continued releasing more articles in the series in November (and I’ll continue in December):

• Part 1: What’s in a Table? Describing Your Data
• Part 2: Feel the Love. Defining Data Relationships
• Part 3: Screen Templates, Which One Do I Choose?
• Part 4: Too much information! Sorting and Filtering Data with Queries

Keep an eye out for the rest of the tutorials right here: Beginning LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2013 series

Vision Clinic Walkthrough and Sample Updated for VS2013

The “classic” Vision Clinic sample was our very first walkthrough for LightSwitch when we first released back in 2011. It’s referenced in our documentation and is meant as a step-by-step guide for building your very first LightSwitch desktop application. This month Steve Hoag re-released it with an additional HTML mobile client, so check it out!

LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2013 Vision Clinic Walkthrough & Sample

More Notable Content this Month

Did I miss anything significant? Post a comment below!

Extensions released this month (see over 100 of them here!):

• Hello World Extension (ADefwebserver)

Samples (see over 100 of them here!):

• Creating A LightSwitch HTML Screen Extension (Adefwebserver)
• LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2013 Vision Clinic Walkthrough & Sample (LightSwitch Team)
• Manipulyte: A Proof Of Concept Visual Studio LightSwitch Turn Based HTML5 Game (Adefwebserver)
• MyCompany STAFF demo application (Cesar de la Torre)
• NuGet: LightSwitch SharePoint HTML Upload Control (Matt Sampson)

Team Articles:   

• All About Newsfeeds With Your Cloud Business App (Nicole Haugen)
• Automatic Row Tracking with Visual Studio 2013 (Amr Altahlawi)
• Beginning LightSwitch in VS 2013 Part 4: Too much information! Sorting and Filtering Data with Queries (Beth Massi)
• Customizing the Table Control: Sortable by Column (Kevin Mehlhaff)
• New Navigation Features in LightSwitch HTML Client (Chris Rummel, Rohit Agrawal)
• Using the Person Business Type (Karol Zadora-Przylecki, Ravi Eda)

Community Articles:

Thanks everyone for your awesome contributions this month!

• Allow LightSwitch Users To Self-Register and Change Passwords Using MVC
• Creating A LightSwitch HTML Screen Extension
• Embedding LIGHTSWITCH IN ENTERPRISE SERVICES (PART 2/N): architecture for scaling out long running processes
• Fundamentals of Visual Studio LightSwitch HTML Screen Template Creation
• How to reset saved sort and column settings of the Silverlight datagrid
• LightSwitch 2013 Core Project with User Management, Tile Screens, Self Registration
• LightSwitch 2013 – Modern UI Menus!
• LightSwitch 2013 – Multi-HTMLClient Project!
• LightSwitch 2013 – Screen shots of multi-client project
• LightSwitch html5 SPA - Audit Manager App
• LightSwitch html5 SPA - Issue Manager App
• LightSwitch html5 SPA - Project Manager App
• LightSwitch html5 SPA - Training Manager App
• LightSwitch Multi-tenancy – Introduction
• LightSwitch working with SharePoint 2013 online data
• LightSwitch working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 or 2013 data
• LS2013 Core Project – PowerShell script to create new app
• LS2013 Core Project – Screen shots
• Using MVC With Visual Studio LightSwitch

Forum Answerers

Thanks to all our LightSwitch forums contributors! Thank you for helping make the LightSwitch community a better place. It’s selfless dedication like this that makes our community rock.

Top 10 forum answerers in November:

Keep up the great work guys!

LightSwitch Team Community Sites

Become a fan of Visual Studio LightSwitch on Facebook. Have fun and interact with us on our wall. Check out the cool stories and resources. Here are some other places you can find the LightSwitch team:

LightSwitch MSDN Forums
LightSwitch Developer Center
LightSwitch Team Blog
LightSwitch on Twitter (@VSLightSwitch, #VS2013 #LightSwitch)

Enjoy!