Trip Report–Techdays 2012 Netherlands

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking again at Techdays Netherlands on Visual Studio LightSwitch. It’s my third time speaking there and the venue is top-notch at the World Forum in The Hague.

Check out all the session recordings for Techdays 2012 on Channel 9.

Introducing Visual Studio LightSwitch

My first session was in a big room that had about 100 people, almost all of them professional developers (they get paid to write code everyday). In this session we build my version of the Vision Clinic application from scratch, end-to-end, including security and deployment. We do write some code but only some simple business rules and calculated fields, and in the end we have a full-blown business application. The goal is to show what LightSwitch can do for you out of the box without having to know any details of the underlying .NET technologies upon which it is built. The recording is available on Channel 9. I suggest downloading the High Quality WMV:

Video Presentation: Introduction to Visual Studio LightSwitch

When I asked who had downloaded LightSwitch already, about 75% raised their hand. I also asked how many people were not professional developers (didn’t get paid to write code) and a few people raised their hand. This is pretty much what I expected since this was a pro developer conference. What I showed in the session is pretty close to what I included in the LightSwitch Training Kit. If you look under the “LightSwitch Overview” on the right-hand sidebar on the opening page of the training kit, you will see the complete demo code and demo script that you can use for training folks at your local user groups. :-)

I also brought some LightSwitch Reviewer’s Guides that marketing created to help convince business decision makers of the value of using LightSwitch. I ran out of them within seconds. I was able to snag the PDF version that you can download here:

Visual Studio LightSwitch Reviewer’s Guide

Here are some more resources to check out that will help introduce you to Visual Studio LightSwitch:

• LightSwitch Developer Center & Learning Center
• Beginning LightSwitch Article Series
• LightSwitch How Do I Videos
• LightSwitch Samples
• LightSwitch Team Blog
• LightSwitch Forums

LightSwitch Advanced Development and Customization Techniques

In this session I showed some more advanced development and different levels of customization that you can do to your LightSwitch applications. There were about 75 people in the session. I was happy to see so many people ready to dive deeper. I started off by showing the Contoso Construction sample application that has some more advanced features like:

• “Home screen” with static images and text and completely custom screen layouts
• Personalization with My Appointments displayed on log in
• “Show Map..” links under the addresses in data grids
• Picture editors
• Reporting via COM interop to Word
• Import data from Excel
• Composite LINQ queries to retrieve/aggregate data
• Custom report filter builder
• Sending email in response to events on the save pipeline

Download the Contoso Construction Sample

Video Presentation: Advanced Development & Customization Techniques

This session demonstrated the many levels of LightSwitch customization from simple code customizations and custom classes all the way to building full blown extensions. I showed how to access the code behind queries so you can write more advanced LINQ statements. I showed some advanced layout techniques for screens. I also showed how to flip to File View and access client and server projects in order to add your own classes. We injected some business rules into the save pipeline in order to email new, updated and canceled appointments. I also showed off the LightSwitch entity API to create an audit trail, and I demonstrated the free Office Integration Pack extension from Grid Logic to create reports with Word and import data from Excel.   

I went through the 6 LightSwitch extensibility points. Shells, themes, screen templates, business types, custom controls and custom data sources. I showed how to install and enable them and then we built a theme. I showed off the LightSwitch Extensibility Toolkit which helps LightSwitch extension developers build these types of extensions. LightSwitch extensions are similar to other Visual Studio extensions, they are also VSIX packages you just click on to install and manage via the Tools –> Extension Manager. Here are some more resources for building LightSwitch extensions:

• Extending Visual Studio LightSwitch
• LightSwitch Extensibility Samples

Also check out all the available LightSwitch extensions on Visual Studio Gallery. In particular I recommend these free ones:

• LightSwitch Metro Theme
• Office Integration Pack
• Filter Control for Visual Studio LightSwitch

As well as ones available from our partners, like:

• DevExpress XtraReports for LightSwitch
• ComponentOne OLAP for LightSwitch
• Document Toolkit for LightSwitch

LightSwitch Masterclass

I came in a day early to speak at a local user group outside of Amsterdam at Sogeti. It started off a little loud because we were sitting near the kitchen in the cafeteria but once they cleaned up, it quieted down. I didn’t mind too much because I’m good at yelling ;-).

There was about 50 people in the Masterclass and I demoed LightSwitch for about two and a half hours. I basically did the two presentations above back-to-back. I got a lot of good feedback and people seemed to really enjoy the class. Afterwards, a lot of us hung out and drank real Heineken and pondered the meaning of software development. Thanks to Michiel van Otegem for organizing this and thanks to all of those who attended.

Fun Stuff

Anytime you attend a conference you get to have fun, especially ones in the Netherlands ;-). One particular highlight was that I got to meet Jan Van der Haegen in person. Jan is a “LightSwitch hacker” so-to-speak and avid blogger. He is one of the most passionate people I know about software design and LightSwitch development. He drove 3 hours from Belgium to The Hague to see me and we chatted for hours. He gave me a lot of great feedback about how to improve the LightSwitch development experience and extensibility model.

We decided to tag along with Gill Clereen and Bart De Smet for dinner where we talked about life, code and everything in between. Jan and I shared a bottle of wine which was an awesome Petite Syrah from a local (to me) Livermore winery -- Concannon Vineyards. It was so cool to see it on the menu that I had to order it. However we didn’t finish it and in Europe they do not have the concept of take out (a.k.a. doggie bag). So they struggled to find a bag for us and ended up giving us one from what I’m told is a five and dime store. LOL. Here’s a (really bad) picture of Bart holding the bag, Jan in the middle and Gill on the right.

Until next time, Netherlands!