LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–December 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.

I realize I’m a week late for this one but like most folks I’ve been on vacation for the holidays. HAPPY NEW YEAR from all of us on the LightSwitch team! It’s great to be back to work and I’m looking forward to a happy, healthy, and geeky 2013. Although December is normally a very quiet month, a lot of goodness around Visual Studio LightSwitch happened. Check it out!

LightSwitch Cosmopolitan Shell Source Code Released!

I know it took a while (we were tied up in some mumbo jumbo with our legal department) but we finally released the source code to the LightSwitch Cosmo Shell! This is the default shell used in new LightSwitch projects created with Visual Studio 2012.  If you want to tweak the current theme & shell to suit your specific needs, this will give you a great starting point with this easily customizable sample. The code and XAML is structured to facilitate making incremental changes to the default shell.

Check out the LightSwitch Team Blog for details: The Cosmopolitan shell and theme source code is released!

LightSwitch Speaking Tour = Success!

In December I travelled all around Eastern Canada (and Vermont) spreading the LightSwitch love. If you missed my trip report, you can read it here - Trip Report: Eastern Canada LightSwitch Speaking Tour

Some key takeaways for me:

• A lot of developers had misconceptions about LightSwitch and had never tried it themselves but were immediately impressed with what it could do once I showed them
• Adding mobile HTML as an alternate client can really fill a gap in the development community. Most developers I spoke with are being “forced” to learn JavaScript & HTML to keep up with business demands and the plethora of mobile devices being used in the enterprise.
• Being able to use LightSwitch as a way to build and deploy data services to Azure is very compelling for native (Win8, iOS, Android, etc.) developers. They can quickly create the shared backend services and concentrate on the clients.

For more, read on….

Update available for WCF Data Services

An update was made available for WCF Data Services 5.0.0 in December which includes some important updates and bug fixes. If you are using LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 we encourage you install this update. Read more about it here: Update available for WCF Data Services 5.0.0

More Notable Content this Month

Samples (see all 96 of them here):

• LightSwitch Cosmopolitan Extension (LightSwitch Team)

Team Articles:

In December, the team continued to write articles on how to write JavaScript with the HTML Client Preview.( We promise we have a lot more on the way!) A couple of our devs also wrote up some tips & tricks posts…

• Custom Controls and Data Binding in the LightSwitch HTML Client (Joe Binder)
• Enhancing LightSwitch Controls with jQuery Mobile (Michael Zlatkovsky)
• LightSwitch – 10 Performance Tweaks Anyone Can Do
• Declaring LightSwitch Publish Wizard Bankruptcy

Community Articles:

I was on a pretty long vacation this month so I may have missed some articles of note. If so, feel free to add a comment below. Many thanks to all our rock star bloggers for contributing in December, particularly Michael Washington!

• Allowing Users To Self Register In Your LightSwitch Website
• An elegant way to instantiate an odata DataServiceContext
• An isolated storage approach for client side caching for feeding a LightSwitch custom control.
• Creating ASP.NET Web Forms CRUD Pages Using ServerApplicationContext
• How to Implement Custom KeyBoard Shortcut in LightSwitch Application
• Inventory Management Application developed using LightSwitch
• Implementing The Wijmo Radial Gauge In The LightSwitch HTML Client
• LightSwitch Cloud Service using OData service
• Retrieving The Current User In The LightSwitch HTML Client
• Using Promises In Visual Studio LightSwitch
• View a SQL Server Reporting Services Report in LightSwitch
• Writing JavaScript That Implements The Binding Pattern In Visual Studio LightSwitch
• XtraReports for LightSwitch does not group on Date fields – convert date to string makes it work

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!

Top 5 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, #VS2012 #LightSwitch)

Enjoy!