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.
LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2
March was an exciting month for us as we released the last HTML Client preview in Visual Studio Update 2 CTP4! The new HTML5 and JavaScript-based client addresses the increasing need to build touch-oriented business applications that run well on modern mobile devices. The preview also supports publishing these apps to SharePoint 2013 & Office 365, so you can also build SharePoint 2013 apps with LightSwitch. To give it a try see:
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Getting Started with LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2
Updated Tutorials
With the latest release we also overhauled our two tutorials that give you a good introduction to developing with the HTML client as well as working with SharePoint 2013. If you haven’t checked these out recently I encourage you to do so.
“Step-By-Step” with Andy Kung
Andy is one of our most popular team writers and he’s put together another GREAT series of articles walking you through building a mobile app with LightSwitch. The app is a clipboard-style app that let’s people sign-in for events and is a good introduction for anyone learning LightSwitch and the HTML client. Check out his “Signed-In” series:
- Signed-In Part 1 – Introduction
- Signed-In Part 2 – Upcoming Events Screen
- Signed-In Part 3 – Guest List Screen
- Signed-In Part 4 – Authentication and Branding
- Signed-In Part 5 – Search Screen and Dynamic UI
Festive Themes from Xpert360
On the western calendar, March had a couple holidays this year – St. Patrick’s day and Easter – and with that, Xpert360 created a few FREE festive themes based on the Cosmopolitan shell. Awesome! Thanks guys!
- Xpert360Lightning - Easter Chick Theme
- Xpert360Lightning - Easter Theme
- Xpert360Lightning - Shamrock Theme
Syncfusion Raffle
In April, Syncfusion will be giving away five Enterprise Syncfusion Essential Studio licenses worth $1999 each! Check out the end of Jan van der Haegen’s blog post for details:
#LightSwitch and #Syncfusion: simply beautiful applications ($10.000 April raffle!)
Events
Earlier this month I spoke at TechDays in the Netherlands and got to meet a couple of my favorite LightSwitch rock stars, Jan van der Haegen and Paul van Bladel. If you missed my trip report check it out:
Trip Report: TechDays Netherlands 2013
We also have a bunch more events coming up. Check it out:
VSLive! Chicago May 13-16
Michael Washington of the famed LightSwitchHelpWebsite.com spoke at VSLive! in Las Vegas last week and is also speaking in Chicago in May. Check out the sessions here.
TechEd North America June 3 – 6 New Orleans, LA &TechEd Europe June 25-28 Madrid, Spain
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.
//build/ June 25 – 28 San Francisco, CA
Enough said. :)
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!):
- Xpert360Lightning - Easter Chick Theme
- Xpert360Lightning - Easter Theme
- Xpert360Lightning - Shamrock Theme
Samples (see all 98 of them here):
Team Articles:
- Announcing a New Preview of the LightSwitch HTML Client
- A New User Experience (Heinrich Wendel)
- A quick & easy LightSwitch app for SharePoint (Brian Moore)
- Designing for Multiple Form Factors (Heinrich Wendel)
- Getting Started with LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 CTP4
- Master-Detail Screens with the LightSwitch HTML Client (Beth Massi)
- Using SharePoint Lists as LightSwitch Entities and with CSOM (Chris Rummel)
- Signed-In Part 1 – Introduction
- Signed-In Part 2 – Upcoming Events Screen
- Signed-In Part 3 – Guest List Screen
- Signed-In Part 4 – Authentication and Branding
- Signed-In Part 5 – Search Screen and Dynamic UI
Community Articles:
- #LightSwitch and #Syncfusion: simply beautiful applications ($10.000 April raffle!)
- “TheLightSwitchToolbox” is born
- Add a full-blown RIA service to your LightSwitch project in 15 seconds
- Adding Images and Text captions in LightSwitch Application
- Beyond the Data Dump or How to leverage Netweaver Gateway and LightSwitch oData functionality in Excel 2013 (Part 1 in Post 2 of a series – confused yet?)
- Create a JQuery slider for LightSwitch HTML pages.
- Create a JQuery searchbox for LightSwitch HTML pages
- Deploying the LightSwitch Application
- Hide the Save/Cancel/Ok/Discard buttons in a LightSwitch HTML screen.
- How to Integrate Telerik RadPivotGrid in LightSwitch 2012
- I’m going to do something, just because it’s really cool.
- Inspired LightSwitch-developer in a changing world.
- Joins and Left Outer Joins in LINQ–Do you want groups with that?
- LightSwitch HTML Client Tag Cloud
- LightSwitch news RSS: bringing you news from around the world! (http://bit.ly/lightswitchnewsRSS)
- Quick and Dirty – Compare your SAP CRM Pipeline to a static target value by leveraging SAP Netweaver Gateway, Visual Studio LightSwitch and Excel 2013 (Part 2: Electric Boogaloo in Post 2 of a series)
- Setting up an integrated build and deploy pipeline for LightSwitch applications (part 1)
- Start web-api commanding in 30 seconds in LightSwitch via Nuget TheLightSwitchToolbox.
- The Power of Usability or How to leverage SAP Netweaver Gateway and Microsoft Office and Visual Studio LightSwitch to meet the needs of the 90% (first in a series)
- Setting and Extensions in LightSwitch Application
- Using the New Group Box Control in LightSwitch Application
- What field do you use to store an Image?
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 Huy Nguyen who has been really helping out in the HTML client preview forum! And another shout out to Yann Duran who consistently shows up in the top 5!
Top 5 forum answerers in March:
| User Name | Answers | Posts |
| Huy Nguyen MSFT | 35 | 132 |
| Yann Duran | 15 | 118 |
| Dave Kidder | 13 | 24 |
| Babloo1436 | 12 | 32 |
| Heinrich M. Wendel | 8 | 29 |
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!