On his blog yesterday, Soma (Sr. VP of Developer Division at Microsoft), announced that Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 will be coming soon. I can tell you, we are really excited about LightSwitch, and apparently you are too (you’ve downloaded over 100,000 copies of Beta 1).
One question that comes up a lot is, what can LightSwitch do versus what can Visual Studio Professional do? What’s the difference? Well, the difference is pretty clear.
Visual Studio LightSwitch is a specialist tool for building line-of-business applications for the desktop and cloud, while Visual Studio Professional is a generalist tool for building anything you can imagine for Microsoft's platforms.
Take a look at this feature matrix and you’ll see what I mean (we’ll get a formal version of this up on http://www.microsoft.com/lightswitch soon).
Visual Studio LightSwitch
Visual Studio Professional
LightSwitch Runtime
Yes
Yes1
Visual Studio Project System
IntelliSense
Team Explorer (Team Foundation Server integration)
-2, 3
Yes3
LIGHTSWITCH APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
Predefined Screen Templates
Application Skinning and Theming
Data Entity Designer
Business-oriented Data Types (e.g. EmailAddress, PhoneNumber, etc.)
Automatic Data Input Validation
Windows Azure Deployment
SQL Azure Support
LANGUAGES, EDITORS & COMPILERS
Visual Basic
Visual C#
Visual C++
-
Visual F#
HTML/JavaScript
Silverlight/XAML Editor
PROJECT TYPES
LightSwitch Application
ASP.NET
ASP.NET AJAX
ASP.NET MVC
Console Application
Database Projects
Office Applications & Add-ins
Setup Projects
SharePoint Applications & WebParts
Test Projects
Visual Studio Add-ins
Windows Forms
Windows Phone
WCF
WPF
XNA Games
1 Only available for LightSwitch applications. Requires Visual Studio LightSwitch and Visual Studio Professional to both be installed. 2 Team Explorer will integrate with LightSwitch but must be installed separately. 3 Requires a Team Foundation Server Client Access License (CAL).
I hope that helps!
D7