New Features Explained – LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012

The team has been cranking out a lot of great content over on the LightSwitch Team blog and a lot of that stuff is related to all the new features in Visual Studio 2012. The Release Candidate (RC) has been available since late May. So if you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to download and play with it and notify us in the LightSwitch RC forum of any issues you encounter. We’re working hard to lock down the release.

With all the (well deserved) hype over the HTML Client Preview lately, I thought it would be helpful to bring some focus back and tally the list of articles on the major new features that are ready to ship that are available in Visual Studio 2012. Just in case you missed them:

OData Services Support

• Creating and Consuming LightSwitch OData Services
• Enhance Your LightSwitch Applications with OData
• LightSwitch Architecture: OData
• Using LightSwitch OData Services in a Windows 8 Metro Style Application
• Creating a LightSwitch Application Using the Commuter OData Service (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
• LightSwitch OData Consumption Validation in Visual Studio 2012
• Finding Your LightSwitch Produced OData Services in Visual Studio 2012

New Data Features

• LightSwitch Concurrency Enhancements in Visual Studio 2012
• User Defined Relationships within Attached Database Data Sources
• Filtering Data using Entity Set Filters

Security Enhancements

• Active Directory Group Support

UI Design Improvements

• New Business Types: Percent & Web Address
• How to Add Images and Text to your LightSwitch Applications
• How to Use the New LightSwitch Group Box
• How to Format Values in LightSwitch

Deployment Enhancements

• LightSwitch IIS Deployment Enhancements in Visual Studio 2012
• Publishing LightSwitch Apps to Azure with Visual Studio 2012

The team is continuing to publish articles on more features so make sure you check the LightSwitch team blog weekly and follow @VSLightSwitch on Twitter. And to see all the great stuff the community has been producing check out my LightSwitch Community & Content Rollups.

Enjoy!