Don't know how many of you participated in the beta (I did) but Microsoft's
Visual Studio LightSwitch is now on sale.
Interesting piece of software that shows a lot of promise - although people familiar with other MS programming tools may wonder why a separate platform for business apps is needed.
Recent article over at
ArsTechnica provides a good summary of what it is, and where it's at right now.
Visual Studio LightSwitch hits the market, but misses its markets
By Peter Bright | Published July 28, 2011 9:16 AM
Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011, Microsoft's new development tool designed for rapid application development (RAD) of line-of-business (LOB) software, has gone on sale, after being released to MSDN subscribers on Tuesday. Priced at $299, the product provides a constrained environment that's purpose-built for producing form-driven, database-backed applications. The applications themselves use Silverlight, for easy deployment on both PCs and Macs, or Azure, Microsoft's cloud service.
This is an important, albeit desperately unsexy, application category. For many organizations, these applications are essential to the everyday running of the company. These programs tend to be written in applications like Access, Excel, FoxPro, and FileMaker—with even Word macros far from unheard of—and typically by people with only rudimentary knowledge of software development—instead being developed either by people who know the business, or perhaps someone from the IT department.
...
<full article>
Link to Microsoft's product and info page
here. A 90-day trial version is available for download.
I'd be very interested in hearing what some of the coders in the DoCo community think about this product. (Ideally
after they've tried it.
)
