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.
I realize I’m a couple days late for this one but I’ve been travelling a lot lately. In fact, I’m sitting in a hotel right now in Toronto writing this before I head out to the Metro Toronto .NET User’s Group meeting (which is at capacity!) to deliver a session. I’m currently on a user group tour here in Canada and will end up in Vermont next week. For details on my schedule see the events section below…
HTML Client Preview 2 Released!
The big news in November was we released the LightSwitch HTML Client Preview 2 that installs right into Visual Studio 2012! With this release, LightSwitch enables developers to easily build touch-oriented business applications with HTML5 that run well across a breadth of devices. These apps can be standalone, but with this preview developers can now also quickly build and deploy data-driven apps for SharePoint using the new web standards-based apps model.
We created a page on the Developer Center that has everything you need to get started: http://msdn.com/lightswitch/htmlclient
1- Get the preview
The LightSwitch HTML Client Preview 2 is a Web Platform Installer (WPI) package which is included in the Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio Preview 2. This includes other components for building SharePoint 2013 Apps. Make sure you have Visual Studio 2012 Professional or higher installed first.
Download: Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio - Preview 2
2- Work through the tutorials
We’ve got a couple tutorials that we released to help you learn the new capabilities. Also check out the HTML Client documentation on MSDN.
LightSwitch HTML Client Tutorial– this tutorial walks you through building an application that connects to existing data services and provides a touch-first, modern experience for mobile devices.
LightSwitch SharePoint Tutorial– this tutorial shows you how to use LightSwitch to build a SharePoint application with an HTML client that runs on a variety of mobile devices. The tutorial shows you how to sign up and deploy to an Office 365 online account.
3- Ask questions and report issues in the forum
We’ve got a dedicated forum specifically for getting feedback and answering questions about the HTML Client Preview release. The team is ready and listening so fire away!
Events
As part of the .NET Rocks! Road Trip, I was in San Diego last week with Richard Campbell & Carl Franklin. 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.
We had the event at the Nokia offices and it was a great venue. Carl did a presentation on building a Windows 8 Store App that let you listen to the DnR podcasts and Richard showed us some of the cool stuff coming in Systems Center. The hosts were amazing, the crowd was great, and I am now totally convinced I need a red Lumia 920! ;-)
Right now I’m on my eastern Canada speaking tour so if you’re in the area and you want to learn more about all the great new stuff in LightSwitch, come on out! I’ll also be delivering an all day workshop on the 8th in Montreal that’s sure to be a blast!
- 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)
New Visual Studio 2012 Videos Released
In November, we also added a couple new videos to the LightSwitch Developer Center’s“How Do I?” video section. These videos continue the Visual Studio 2012 series where I walk through the new features available in LightSwitch in VS 2012.
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How Do I: Perform Automatic Row-Level Filtering of Data?
In this video, see how you can perform row level filtering by using the new Filter methods in LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012. Since LightSwitch is all about data, one of the features we added in Visual Studio 2012 is the ability to filter sets of data no matter how or what client is accessing them. This allows you to set up system-wide filtering on your data to support row level security as well as multi-tenant scenarios.
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How Do I: Deploy a LightSwitch App to Azure Websites?
In this video lean how you can deploy your LightSwitch applications to the new Azure websites using Visual Studio 2012. Azure Websites are for quick and easy web application and service deployments. You can start for free and scale as you go. One of the many great features of LightSwitch is that it allows you to take your applications and easily deploy them to Azure.
More Notable Content this Month
Extensions released this month (see over 100 of them here!):
CLASS Extensions (Kostas Christodoulou (Computer Life)) - A Collection of business types, controls and more
Samples (see all 91 of them here):
- LightSwitch HTML Client Tutorial (LightSwitch Team)
- LightSwitch SharePoint Tutorial (LightSwitch Team)
- Executing an arbitrary method or long-running process on the LightSwitch server (Jan Van der Haegen)
- LightSwitch HTML Preview - first impressions (Jan Van der Haegen)
Team Articles:
- New LightSwitch HTML Client APIs (Stephen Provine)
- A New API for LightSwitch Server Interaction: The ServerApplicationContext (Joe Binder)
- Building a LightSwitch HTML Client: eBay Daily Deals (Andy Kung)
- Getting Started with the LightSwitch HTML Client Preview 2 (Beth Massi)
- Building an HTML Client for a LightSwitch Solution in 5 Minutes (Beth Massi)
Community Articles:
Thanks to all of you who share your knowledge with the community for free, whether that’s blogs, forums, speaking, etc. The community (particularly Michael Washington, Paul Van Bladel & Jan van der Haegen) also published these gems in November. As you can see, these folks are pretty excited about the HTML Client Preview 2.
- Writing JavaScript In LightSwitch HTML Client Preview
- Creating JavaScript Using TypeScript in Visual Studio LightSwitch (see the discussion in the forum thread here: TypeScript and LightSwitch HTML - a perfect match?)
- Fixing WCF RIA Services After Upgrading To HTML Client
- Theming Your LightSwitch Website Using JQuery ThemeRoller
- Rumor has it… LightSwitch HMTL Client preview 2 is released – omg omg omg with a ServerApplicationContext?!?
- Executing an arbitrary method or long-running process on the LightSwitch server
- OData Security Using The Command Table Pattern And Permission Elevation
- LightSwitch News – Find out what the LightSwitch community is up to
- CodeSchool: taking my first baby steps in JQuery
- Automatically deploy a LightSwitch-ready hosting website with ability to set the https certificate.
- Automatically deploy a LightSwitch-ready application pool with ability to set the app pool Identity.
- Integrating hosting web site creation in an automated LightSwitch factory
- Using SignalR in LightSwitch to process toast notifications to connected clients.
- Handling in LightSwitch commands in less than 10 lines of code.
Top Forum Answerers
Thanks to all our contributors to the LightSwitch forums on MSDN. Thank you for helping make the LightSwitch community a better place. Another huge shout out to Yann Duran who consistently provides help in our General forum and is now one of our forum moderators!
Top 5 forum answerers in November:
User Name | Posts | Answers |
| Yann Duran | 88 | 11 |
| Xpert360 | 8 | 3 |
| Paul Van Bladel | 19 | 2 |
| SAinCA | 15 | 2 |
| Cliff_McManus | 4 | 2 |
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!