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...

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...

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...

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...

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 article I showed how to connect LightSwitch to SharePoint data in order to pull users’ Task Lists into your LightSwitch applications. If you missed it: Using SharePoint Data in your LightSwitch Applications There we created a screen that pulled up the logged in users’ tasks from SharePoint...

A common requirement in business applications is to capture changes to data records and save them in a history table of some sort. For instance, when an employee’s HR record is changed, you need to log the original and new field values as well as who made the changes so that there is a visible audit...

Last post I showed how to migrate our Northwind Outlook client to .NET 4 and Office 2010 . This Outlook Add-in displays order history information in an adjoining form region so sales associates can see that data immediately when communicating with customers. When we originally built this with Visual...

This month Dev Pro Connections has an article by Milind Lele on using Sync Services in a WPF application: Building Occasionally Connected Smart Clients with WPF With Sync Services and Visual Studio 2008 you can visually design your local data cache and have it automatically synchronize your data with...

Yesterday John posted on the Visual Studio Data blog how to Refresh the Primary Key Identity Column during an Insert Operation using SQL Server. In that post he shows how the DataSet designer sets up a batch Insert statement to retrieve identity keys automatically. A while back I wrote about how to insert...

Yesterday we released a couple more videos onto the Visual Basic Developer Center on building WPF data-entry forms with Entity Framework: How Do I: Hook Up and Display Validation in WPF using Entity Framework? How Do I: Build a WPF Master-Detail Data Entry Form Using Entity Framework? That makes 5 videos...

This month’s MSDN Magazine has a particularly good article in there by Danny Simmons , Development Manager on the Entity Framework team, on N-Tier Application Patterns with Entity Framework   that I recommend reading through. He explains the design considerations you need to take into account when...

In this post and video I’ve shown folks how to work with a local database file (.mdf, .mdb, .sdf) that resides directly inside your project in order to see updates made while debugging your application. If it looks like everything saves fine while debugging, but you can’t see the updates if you look...

Since my last post on filtering child collections using Entity Framework , I have had more than a few emails about how to load filtered child DataTables that are part of a master-detail relationship and then get them to save properly through the TableAdapters. Many people are running into the problem...

Today I thought I would talk about a really common scenario in data applications, creating a master-details (one-to-many) data entry form. I’ve written about WPF data binding and Entity Framework a lot in the past: Posts: Master-Details with Entity Framework Explicit Load Loading Data and...

One of the many samples released for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 that you should be aware of are examples of WPF data binding against Entity Data Models. You can find some easy to follow samples here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WPFDatabinding This sample demonstrates how to create a WPF Forms solution...

Here it is folks, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 has been released to the public today. Check out the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 site to download the Beta, submit product feedback on the Beta 1 Forums , report bugs on Connect , and find additional information. Also visit the Beta 1 walkthroughs...

I’ve posted before about how to use TableAdapters to update parent-child (master-detail) relationships against SQL server. It’s pretty straightforward and Visual Studio generates all the code for you to properly insert, update and delete your data. However if you’re using MS Access then there’s one thing...

The ObservableCollection is a special WPF collection that provides proper notifications to the UI when items are added, removed, or the list is refreshed because it implements INotifyCollectionChanged . It’s common to use this collection (or inherit from it) to contain your business objects you want...

Last week I wrote about how to data bind WPF lookup comboboxes to entities returned from the Entity Framework. I described that the key to this type of binding is setting the SelectedItem to the object reference itself on the navigation property instead of setting SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath...

It’s extremely common to have to hook up lookup tables on your data entry forms in order to populate foreign keys in a database. I’ve talked about how to do this in Winforms and WPF with Datasets and LINQ to SQL before: How Do I: Create a Lookup Combobox in WPF? How Do I: Create a Master-Detail Data...

Today I got a question that comes up often in data application programming about how to count rows in a DataSet that matched a condition. The DataSet may be bound to a DataGridView or other list control and it’s tempting to start looking at the control to see if you can coax it into returning what you...