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.
This month we had a lot of activity in the LightSwitch community. Particularly fun for the team was the MVP Summit where we got to present to the top experts in the Microsoft community.
LightSwitch at MVP Summit
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.
The LightSwitch team presented to the MVPs on all the awesome features that are coming in the next refresh of LightSwitch (Version 3), which includes HTML5/JavaScript client as well as SharePoint support. We spoke with Developer MVPs and SharePoint MVPs and they were equally excited about the future of LightSwitch. We can’t wait to get the next release into the public hands! I know you’re going to ask me “WHEN???” – all I can say is “soon” :-)
New LightSwitch Book – LightSwitch in Action
Dan Beall and Greg Lutz have written a book on LightSwitch that I started to read and I like it so far! It contains information on the latest version of LightSwitch including OData support and the new HTML client.
LightSwitch in Action is available now as an eBook and will be available later in print. The authors have made the first chapter available for free here so check it out! Thanks guys!
Upcoming Events
Mark your calendars! There will be some great LightSwitch sessions at these events coming up.
TechDays Netherlands March 7th – 8th The Hague, NL
Yours truly will be speaking next week in The Hague. I’ve got three juicy sessions with new demos and bits to show off! I’m also hoping to see some of those European community members at the show. In fact, I’ll be meeting up with a couple of my two favorite LightSwitch-ers, Paul Van Bladel&Jan Van der Haegen. Can’t wait!
East Bay.NET User Group March 14th – Berkeley, CA
Plugging my local user group here :-). I’ll be speaking here next meeting and the session will be sure to turn heads and please those who are struggling with extending their business apps into the mobile space.
VSLive! Las Vegas March 25 – 29 &VSLive! Chicago May 13-16
Michael Washington of the famed LightSwitchHelpWebsite.com is speaking at VSLive! in Las Vegas and then Chicago. Sounds like a couple really good sessions:
- Create HTML5 Mobile Websites with Visual Studio LightSwitch
- Creating Web Sites Using Visual Studio LightSwitch
TechEd North America June 3 – 6 New Orleans, LA
Session details haven’t been announced yet but you can be sure that we’ll have a LightSwitch presence at TechEd again this year.
FalafelCon 2013 June 10th – 11th Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus, Mountain View, CA
I’ll also be speaking at the conference put on by Falafel Software, Telerik & Microsoft. It’s here in my neck of the woods and it should be a great event with a lot of very well known speakers.
Did I miss any events? Drop me a comment below!
More Notable Content this Month
Extensions released this month (see over 100 of them here!):
- Luminous Tools for LightSwitch by YannDuran (Luminous Software) A collection of Visual Studio productivity extensions for LightSwitch
Samples (see all 97 of them here):
Team Articles:
- Building a SharePoint App with LightSwitch
- LightSwitch OData Tip: Easily Expose Many-to-Many Relationships using Queries
Community Articles:
- A downloadable sample for SignalR commanding & toast notifications in LightSwitch
- A downloadable LightSwitch solution for web-api based commanding and reporting.
- A practical extension method for the modal window enter key “bug” in LightSwitch.
- Adding calculated fields to your HTML5 LightSwitch project
- An End-To-End Visual Studio LightSwitch HTML5 Application
- Best practice: using _Changed methods
- Book Excerpt: LightSwitch in Action
- Creating Mobile Dashboards using LightSwitch and the ReportPlus app from Infragistics
- Connecting To SignalR With LightSwitch HTML Client
- Deploy additional sql scripts during automated deployment with web deploy for a LightSwitch project
- Free your disk: cleaning up the bin/debug folder.
- Getting Started with Visual Studio LightSwitch - Part 1: Introduction to Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch
- Getting Started with Visual Studio LightSwitch - Part 2: Developing your first LightSwitch Application using Visual Studio
- Getting Started with Visual Studio LightSwitch - Part 3: Screen Templates in LightSwitch Application
- Getting Started with Visual Studio LightSwitch - Part 4: Working with Tables in LightSwitch Application
- Getting Started with Visual Studio LightSwitch - Part 5: Handling Data in LightSwitch Application
- Getting Started with Visual Studio LightSwitch - Part 6: Validating Data in a LightSwitch Application
- LightSwitch Frameworkonomics
- LightSwitch Recipes and all that is Windows 8 Goodness
- LightSwitch: technology overview.
- Self-reporting via Excel power pivot in highly deferred execution mode.
- Why are serious .Net line of business app developers not embracing today LightSwitch?
- Why serious .Net developers should stop building LOB “frameworks” which look promising on the outside and are inherently simplistic on the inside.
- Simple commanding with Web-Api
- Team Time Tracker: My First LightSwitch Application
- Reporting with Web-Api in LightSwitch
- Rescue Legacy Data using LightSwitch, Stored Procedures, and Dynamic SQL, Part 1
Did I miss any good articles? Drop me a comment below!
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. Great job this month from our very own Justin Anderson!
Top 5 forum answerers in February:
| User Name | Answers | Posts |
| Justin Anderson | 4 | 8 |
| Dino HE | 2 | 3 |
| Yann Duran | 1 | 12 |
| Norman A. Armas | 1 | 4 |
| Glenn Wilson | 1 | 5 |
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!