Often times in business applications we have a lot of information to present on a screen, and depending on the user’s screen resolution that information may scroll off the page. Visual Studio LightSwitch ’s screen templates are set to automatically apply a vertical scrollbar to screens when this happens...

Last Fall 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 out here: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–September 2011 LightSwitch Community & Content...

Very often in business applications we need to validate data through another service. I’m not talking about validating the format of data entered – this is very simple to do in LightSwitch -- I’m talking about validating the meaning of the data. For instance, you may need to validate not just the format...

I had a reader ask a question this week on how to use Visual Studio LightSwitch to open different Edit Detail screens based on the “type” of record. This is a very common thing to do especially for data models that use table inheritance (or sub-tables). For instance say we are building an application...

A common technique on data entry screens is using one “drop down list” (called an auto-complete box in LightSwitch) as a filter into the next. This limits the amount of choices that need to be brought down and guides the user into easily locating values. This technique is also useful if you have cascading...

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and enjoyed some well-deserved time off. I sure did! Now that I’m back in the office I’m a few days overdue for this post so here ya go! A few months ago I started posting a rollup of interesting community happenings, content, samples and...

Welcome to Part 6 of the Beginning LightSwitch series ! In parts 1 thru 5 we built an Address Book application and learned all about the major building blocks of a Visual Studio LightSwitch application -- entities, relationships, screens, queries and user permissions. If you missed them: Part 1: What...

Welcome to Part 5 of the Beginning LightSwitch series ! In parts 1 thru 4 we learned about entities, relationships, screens and queries in Visual Studio LightSwitch . If you missed them: Part 1: What’s in a Table? Describing Your Data Part 2: Feel the Love. Defining Data Relationships Part 3: Screen...

Welcome to Part 4 of the Beginning LightSwitch series ! In part 1, 2 and 3 we learned about entities, relationships and screens in Visual Studio LightSwitch . If you missed them: Part 1: What’s in a Table? Describing Your Data Part 2: Feel the Love. Defining Data Relationships Part...

Welcome to Part 3 of the Beginning LightSwitch series ! In part 1 and part 2 we learned about entities and relationships in LightSwitch and how to use the Data Designer to define them. If you missed them: Part 1: What’s in a Table? Describing Your Data Part 2: Feel the Love. Defining Data Relationships...

Welcome to Part 2 of the Beginning LightSwitch series ! In the last post we learned about tables, or entities, in LightSwitch and how to use the Data Designer to define them. If you missed it: Beginning LightSwitch Part 1: What’s in a Table? Describing Your Data In this article I want to focus on data...

Welcome to Part 1 of the Beginning LightSwitch series ! To get things started, we’re going to begin with one of the most important building blocks of a LightSwitch application, the table . Simply put, a table is a way of organizing data in columns and rows. If you’ve ever used Excel or another spreadsheet...

For the month of December I’m going to write a series of posts aimed at the beginner developer getting up to speed with Visual Studio LightSwitch . At least I’m going to try ;-). It’s been a while since I was a beginner myself and started cobbling lines of code together – in fact...

A couple months ago I started posting a rollup of interesting community happenings, content, and sites popping up. If you missed those rollups you can check them out here, lot of great content and exciting events happened: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–September 2011 LightSwitch Community...

Before Microsoft, I used to work in the health care industry building software for hospitals and health insurance companies. In all of those systems we had detailed audit trails (change logging), authorization systems, and complex business rules to keep patient data safe. One particular requirement that...

Checking the validity of data input is a common requirement for any application that interacts with humans (and other systems), particularly business applications. I’ve never seen or written a data-entry application without implementing common validation rules for inputting data. LightSwitch has many...

Last month I started posting a rollup of interesting community happenings, content, and sites popping up. Particularly last month we had an explosion of extensions and a great list of community sites to check out: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–September Here’s a rollup of October tricks...

Visual Studio LightSwitch makes it easy to create and model database tables using the Data Designer . With this designer you have a simple interface into the Tables, Columns and Relationships that make up your data model. When you create tables this way, under the covers LightSwitch creates a SQL Express...

Visual Studio LightSwitch released with a set of 7 Starter Kits that people can use as starting points for their own applications. You can download them or install them directly in Visual Studio LightSwitch using the Extension Manager. Take a look at Robert Green’s Visual Studio Toolbox episode for more...

In this post I wanted to pull together some command tips that seem common when building features into the screens in your business applications. Some of them are floating around on the LightSwitch forums, community blogs, and samples but I thought having these in one place would be easier for folks....

Now that the Visual Studio LightSwitch community is really growing I thought I’d start posting some of the cool articles, videos, samples and extensions I find each month. What’s great about a blog post is if I miss something you can just add it to the comment thread below :-). First off, here are the...

Last week Grid Logic released a FREE LightSwitch extension called the Office Integration Pack which has quickly risen to the second most popular LightSwitch extension on VS Gallery ! It lets you populate documents and spreadsheets with data, create email and appointments with Outlook, import data from...

First off let me say WOW, it’s great to be back to blog writing! Sorry I have been away for a couple weeks – I’ve been working on a lot of cool stuff internally since I got back from my trip . And I know I have a loooooong list of article and video suggestions from all of you that I...

In my last post I showed you how to create a multi-column auto-complete box in Visual Studio LightSwitch . I also showed you how to use multiple layouts and easily enable editing on the data inside the auto-complete box. In this post I want to address another very common use case in business applications...

In this post I’d like to address a very common usage of drop-downs (otherwise known as Combo-boxes or Auto-complete boxes) that allow users to pick from a list of values coming from a lookup or parent table, commonly referred to as “Lookup lists”.  Typically these lists display one column like the...