LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–October 2012

Last year I started posting a 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.

October was relatively quiet on the LightSwitch front personally for me. I went on a week long vacation to Cabo San Lucas for my birthday and I turned all electronic devices off! That’s what I call a real vacation :-) I did speak at a couple conferences though and we have a lot of events coming up, check it out.

Events & Conferences

I presented at a couple conferences in the beginning of the month, one all the way in Sofia Bulgaria for DevReach and then again at the Silicon Valley Code Camp.  I presented two LightSwitch sessions at each of these, one demonstrating the HTML Client Preview for building business apps for Mobile devices and another on building OData services and deploying them to Azure. I have to say, I think people are very excited about the HTML client! If you missed my trip report you can read it here as well as download the slides I presented:

Trip Report–DevReach Bulgaria & Silicon Valley Code Camp

John Stallo (Lead PM for the LightSwitch team) also has a session at //BUILD where he’ll show off some more goodies with the LightSwitch HTML client. The recording will be available afterwards so be sure to check it out. If you haven’t been paying attention this week there have already been some awesome sessions & keynotes on how to build beautiful apps for Windows 8 and Windows 8 Phone. Just head to: http://www.buildwindows.com/ to watch live.

Lots of LightSwitch Events Coming Up

We’ve got a lot more events coming up where me and the team will be speaking on LightSwitch.

As part of Richard Campbell & Carl Franklin’s .NET Rocks Road Trip, I’ll be the guest star in San Diego on November 27th. Carl & Richard rented a big 37' RV and have been travelling all over the US & Canada for the launch of Visual Studio 2012. At each stop they record a live .NET Rocks! show with a guest star. Following that, they each do a presentation around building modern applications on the Windows platform.

Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip
Nov 27th @ 6pm – 16620 West Bernardo Drive, San Diego, CA (REGISTER HERE)

I’ll also be speaking in San Diego next week at the .NET User Group there. Then I’ll be touring eastern Canada in December (don’t ask me how a little Italian is going to survive the cold Canadian weather). Hope to see you at one of these events!

• Nov 1st: //BUILD (Redmond, WA)
• Nov 6th: San Diego .NET Developers Group (San Diego, CA)
• Nov 27th: Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip (San Diego, CA)
• Dec 3rd: North Toronto .NET UG (Toronto, ON)
• Dec 4th: Metro Toronto .NET UG (Toronto, ON)
• Dec 5th: East of Toronto .NET UG (Pickering, ON)
• Dec 6th: Ottawa IT Community User Group (Ottawa, ON)
• Dec 8th: Full-day LightSwitch Workshop (Montreal, QC)    
• Dec 10th – 11th: DevTeach 2012 (Montreal, QC)
• Dec. 11th: Vermont.NET User Group (Winooski, VT)

Many thanks to Jean Rene-Roy for setting up the Canadian tour and the full day workshop before DevTeach this year! 

More Notable Content this Month

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

• Signature Controls for LightSwitch (Jason Williams, Centrolutions)- LightSwitch Control Extension that allows the user to use a mouse, touch (finger), or stylus to sign their name or draw a picture. Great for membership databases, document databases, and pretty much any other application that requires a signature to be produced.

Samples (see all 91 of them here):

• Control colors of DataGrid rows and other UI elements in LightSwitch (Xpert360)
• Manipulate sort and column settings programmatically (Xpert360)

Team Articles:

• Easily Deploy Your LightSwitch Apps to Azure Websites in Minutes

Community Articles:

Huge shout out again to Paul van Bladel for pumping out so many articles two months in a row! Michael Washington from LightSwitchHelpWebsite.com assures me he will be pumping out more articles soon.. no pressure Michael! ;-) Thanks to all of you who share your knowledge with the community for free, whether that’s blogs, forums, speaking, etc.

• A cool OData hack in LightSwitch
• Applying server-side caching via a Ria Service
• LightSwitch Treeview on demand loading with direct OData connection – part 3
• Introducing on demand loading in the LightSwitch treeview user control – part 2
• In search for an improved treeview solution – part 1.
• Semantic zoom with pivot viewer – a sample application

Top Forum Answerers

I thought I’d start a section on the top forum contributors to recognize all the help these folks give everyday to answering questions in the LightSwitch forums on MSDN. These folks deserve as much credit as our bloggers, as they are also helping make the LightSwitch community a better place.

Huge shout out to Yann Duran who consistently provides help in our General forum!

Top 5 forum answerers in October:

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, #VS2012 #LightSwitch)

Enjoy!