The easiest way to get started developing SharePoint apps with LightSwitch is to sign up for a free trial of an Office 365 Developer account at dev.office.com. Because Office 365 has moved from preview to release, if you signed up for a preview account, you have until May 31st to convert it to a paid...

I’ve had a couple questions recently on how you could add data to tables that have a one-to-zero-or-one relationship in Visual Studio LightSwitch. Depending on whether the related record is mandatory (required) or not you have a couple different options when inserting data. So in this post I’ll show...

Last year 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 all out here: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollups . This month was FULL OF AWESOMENESS as we finally...

LightSwitch is all about building business solutions quickly -- defining your data models & business rules and visually creating screens with a set of built-in controls. It does all the boring plumbing so you can concentrate on the real value of your applications. But LightSwitch also allows for...

Last post I showed a simple way of checking a single user permission from an HTML client screen in order to disable/enable UI elements. If you only have a couple permissions to check and you don’t want to write a lot of code then this simple tip works. However, if you need to check many permissions throughout...

UPDATE 4/17: If you’re not afraid to write some code, here’s a more robust way to get all the user permissions with one database call into the HTML client and use via JavaScript on any screen: Using LightSwitch ServerApplicationContext and WebAPI to Get User Permissions ---------------- Those of you...

Just announced! I’ll be delivering an all-day training at DevTeach again – this time in Toronto on May 25th! This was a huge success when I did it in Montreal so I’m happy to do this again. This time though, I have a lot of new content related to the release of the HTML client and SharePoint 2013 support...

This morning we released the LightSwitch HTML client in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2! I can’t tell you how excited I am to see this released to the public. It’s been an exciting, challenging journey and I congratulate the team on this important milestone of one of the most exciting products I have been...

Last year 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 all out here: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollups . LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 Update...

Since we released the latest version of the LightSwitch HTML Client a couple weeks ago, the team has been cranking out some awesome content on the LightSwitch Team blog around the new capabilities as well as some good How-To’s. And there’s a lot more coming! If you’re just getting started with the HTML...

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at TechDays in The Hague, Netherlands . It was my fourth time speaking there and as always the show does not disappoint! Held at the World Forum, the venue is big, bright and flashy. Check out the session recordings as they become available on Channel 9 . I had...

UPDATE 4/4/2013: We have released the HTML Client! Please see this post for updated information & resources: LightSwitch HTML Client & SharePoint Resources–Get Started Building HTML5 Business Apps Today! Today CTP4 of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 released which now also includes...

Last year 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 all out here: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollups . This month we had a lot of activity in...

The other day I got an email from a good friend trying to expose a many-to-many relationship via his LightSwitch OData service . He was trying to recreate a feed similar to the one at http://odata.msteched.com/teau12/sessions.svc/ using LightSwitch. What he wanted to see was a list of all the speakers...

Last year 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 all out here: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollups . Wow it’s still strange to me to be typing...

One of the many great benefits of building HTML clients with LightSwitch is that you can easily change the theme of your apps with standard CSS. When you install the HTML Client Preview 2 you get two themes to choose from, a dark theme (the default in Preview 2) and a light theme. However you can completely...

About a week ago I showed you how to get started building SharePoint 2013 apps with LightSwitch HTML Client Preview 2 by signing up for a free Office 365 developer account and working through the Survey App tutorial . If you missed it: Get Started Building SharePoint Apps in Minutes with LightSwitch...

With LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 (a.k.a LightSwitch V2) your server projects target the .NET Framework 4.0. This was a conscious decision on the team’s part in order to allow V2 applications to be deployed to the same servers running V1 applications with no fuss. Additionally the LightSwitch runtime...

I’ve dabbled in SharePoint 2010 development in the past by using Visual Studio. In fact, I wrote a fair share of articles and samples about it. However I’ve been slacking when it comes to really learning the new app model in SharePoint 2013 . I’ve got a good understanding of the architecture...

I was doing some content analysis this morning for this blog and the LightSwitch team blog and I thought it would be fun to list off the most viewed LightSwitch team articles of 2012. Then I thought it would probably be helpful to also look at the most popular “ How Do I” videos on the Developer Center...

Last year 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 all out here: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollups . I realize I’m a week late for this one but...

Wow! What a great trip! I got back late last week from an amazing 10-day tour through eastern Canada (and Vermont) spreading the LightSwitch love. Thanks to all the user group leaders, conference organizers, and friends who made this trip possible. I was happy to see the great turnout at all the events...

Last year 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 all out here: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollups . I realize I’m a couple days late for this...

Check it out! We just released a couple new videos on the LightSwitch Developer Center’s “How Do I?” video section . These videos continue the Visual Studio 2012 series where I walk through the new features available in LightSwitch in VS 2012. How Do I: Perform Automatic Row-Level Filtering of Data?...

If you haven’t heard, we released the HTML Client Preview 2 last week which adds the ability to create HTML5/JavaScript based clients to your LightSwitch solutions. I thought it would be a good exercise to add an HTML companion application to my Contoso Construction sample to demonstrate just how quickly...