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Overview With a little homage to Hot Shots Part Deux we’ll drill in a bit deeper utilizing the ServerApplicationContext for creating Dashboard reports. Part 1 is here: Create Dashboard Reports with LightSwitch, WebAPI and ServerApplicationContext LightSwitch Productivity/Extendability disclaimer : As...

Overview Applications are creating and consuming more data than ever before. With so much data, how can your users quickly spot trends and get an overview of what’s important? Just as your car presents a dashboard indicating the top priority items, so can your application. Matt introduced the ServerApplicationContext...

Before I show you all the wonderful things about LightSwitch , let me tell you a little story behind this post. I’m a college football fan. During the football season, I’d attend the game watching events organized by the local alumni association. At every event, the organizer would pass around a sign...

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 we walk through the new features available in LightSwitch in VS 2012. How Do I: Perform Automatic Row-Level Filtering of Data...

Yesterday, we gave an overview of the Course Manager sample and walked through some scenarios from end-user’s perspective . If you missed it: Course Manager VS 2012 Sample Part 1 – Introduction We are now ready to start “reverse-engineering” and learning how to build Course Manager. We will kick off...

Sorting data across relationships is often required when building applications within LightSwitch.  For example, suppose you are building a LightSwitch application that attaches to the Category and Product tables from the Northwind database. You can probably imagine applications in which you would...

Matt Sampson has a new blog today that covers how to find your OData Services that LightSwitch produces, and then how to create a custom Silverlight control for your LightSwitch screens that easily enables you to find these OData Services. Check out the blog post - Finding Your LightSwitch Produced...

Many problems can occur in applications when multiple users are allowed to edit the same record at the same time. Some simple applications take a “last edit wins” approach, where the last person to save their changes gets their changes applied in the end. This has the obvious problem that...

Eric Erhardt has posted part 2 in his series on using stored procedures in LightSwitch. In the second part, he describes how you can use Visual Studio LightSwitch to update database records using stored procedures.  A lot of database administrators only allow modifications to data through stored...

The first release of Visual Studio LightSwitch (LightSwitch V1) allows users to define relationships between tables within the intrinsic/built-in data source (ApplicationData). When attaching to existing data sources, LightSwitch will import the relationships defined within the data source. In addition...

In Visual Studio 2012 , LightSwitch data services publish OData feeds and LightSwitch clients consume the OData feeds. This is an implementation change from LightSwitch 2011 where we used WCF RIA Services as the data protocol between client and server. In this post we’ll take a look at the OData...

Check it out, we released a new “How Do I” video on the LightSwitch Developer Center : How Do I: Handle Database Concurrency Issues? In a multi-user environment, when two users pull up the same record from the database and modify it, when the second user saves the data it raises a data conflict because...

Concurrency issues are common in multi-user applications that have a database on the backend. The good news is that LightSwitch makes concurrency very easy to handle by providing two different mechanisms: When a conflict is detected, a “Data Conflict” screen is automatically displayed...

In a business application there is often a need to roll-up data and display it in a concise format.  This allows decision makers the ability to analyze the state of the business and make a decision quickly and correctly.  This roll-up may retrieve data from many different sources, slice it...

Note: This article has been updated for Beta 2 on 3/17/2011 Many business applications require many-to-many relationships. For example, an author can write many books , and a book can be written by many authors . To model this relationship in LightSwitch, you need to create a mapping table for the 2...

In prior posts I’ve covered the LightSwitch presentation tier and the logic tier . The presentation tier is primarily responsible for human interaction with the application using data from a LightSwitch logic tier. The logic tier comprises one or more LightSwitch data services whose primary job...

Introduction In any application that accepts user input and stores it in a data store, the data needs to be validated. When it comes to relational databases, most of them today provide some form of validation. This includes constraints, data formatting, default values, etc. For example, you can’t...