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...

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...

Some folks have been asking for this so I just released the completed Address Book sample that you build step-by-step in the Beginning LightSwitch Article Series .   Download the Address Book Sample Read the Series Are you completely new to LightSwitch and software development? Read this entry-level...

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...

Tomorrow evening I’ll be presenting Visual Studio LightSwitch to Sac.NET in the Sacramento area. Please come join us! I always try and make it a fun and lively presentation and I’ll have tons of demos. Here are the details: When: Tuesday, November 29th at 6:00 PM Where: Rancho Cordova Library, 9845 Folsom...

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...

I’ll be speaking about LightSwitch next Wednesday in Mountain View so if you’re in the area come on out and I’ll show you what LightSwitch can do for you! See how to build business applications in light speed…. Building Business Applications in Light Speed with Visual Studio LightSwitch When: Wednesday...

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...

Check it out, I’m back with the always entertaining Carl Franklin on dnrTV showing some tips and tricks you can use in your screens and queries. See how you can add command bars to any control, create custom search screens, pass parameters into queries, and fine-tune the layout of your screens. Watch...

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...

Thanks to Peter Kellner and all the folks that made for another extraordinary Silicon Valley Code Camp this year! There were over 2300 people that came to Foothill college in Los Altos this weekend. And what gorgeous weather we had!     Thanks to all those folks who came out to my LightSwitch...