The Problem: The other day I published an updated version of my Windows Phone app CalcuFitness after some major code refactoring. Much to my surprise, I discovered that the app certification process determined that my app required the location services...

In the LightSwitch apps that I create, I have a common pattern where I display a “Loading” message in the title bar of a screen while it is loading and then set it to its actual screen name once it’s finished.  In particular, this is useful for screens...

When configuring a Visual Studio LightSwitch application to use Forms authentication, the application user is prompted with the following login UI when they open the application: Many LightSwitch customers have asked about creating their own custom UI...

Think you’ve got what it takes to be a LightSwitch star?  Check out the new LightSwitch application contest at http://www.codeproject.com/Competitions/524/LightSwitch-Star-Contest.aspx .

Today is an exciting day. After years of hard work, Visual Studio LightSwitch V1 has been released. This is my first shipped product while working in the Server & Tools Division at Microsoft and I couldn’t be happier (my previous shipped products...

Visual Studio LightSwitch makes use of .NET portable assemblies to allow developers to write business logic that can be executed on both the client (Silverlight) and server (.NET 4) tiers.  In LightSwitch terminology, we refer to the assembly that...

I’m very excited to say that we’ve released Beta 2 of Visual Studio LightSwitch to MSDN subscribers. It will be available publicly on Thursday, Mar. 17. So go out there and start downloading. Let us know what you think.

One of the features available in Visual Studio LightSwitch is to model queries that can be reused in other queries that you model.  This allows developers to write a potentially complex query once and be able to define other queries which reuse that...

In Visual Studio LightSwitch, there are a set of security entities defined by the runtime such as UserRegistration, Role, and Permission. Numerous people have asked how they can create relationships to these entities. These entities can’t be referenced...

In many applications, you need to filter data that is only relevant to the particular user that is logged in. For example, a personal information manager application may only want users to view their own tasks and not the tasks of other users. Here’s...

Securing your Visual Studio LightSwitch application begins with defining permissions. In the first version of LightSwitch, developers are responsible for defining and consuming their own permissions. Once permissions have been defined, you can write the...

Visual Studio LightSwitch provides screen templates for defining a details screen or a new data screen for an entity. But you may want to use the same screen for doing both tasks. This allows you to have a consistent experience no matter whether you are...

Today is the day where everyone can now download Beta 1 of Visual Studio LightSwitch.  Check it out!

LightSwitch lets you configure your applications to use authentication. This allows you to control who is able to access the application and lets your business logic know who the current user is. Configuring the type of authentication to use LightSwitch...

The beta release of Visual Studio LightSwitch has just been made available via MSDN subscription!  You can find it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/downloads .  Just select Developer Tools –> Visual Studio 2010 and you’ll see it...

Visual Studio LightSwitch is all about creating LOB applications.  And, of course, managing who can access the data in those applications is highly important.  LightSwitch aims to make the task of managing security simple for both the developer...

I’m back.  And this time for good.  I promise. During the past couple of years, I’ve been working on a cool new developer tool product called Visual Studio LightSwitch.  If you haven’t heard of it, Jason Zander has a good blog post about...

I've been defining some interfaces for some classes in our code. The classes implement IDisposable and I was wondering whether the class' corresponding interface should also derive from IDisposable. For example: class Foo : IFoo, IDisposable...

I'm a fan of Office OneNote. And when combined with the technology of Live Mesh , it creates a killer user experience. I've been using OneNote at work for a while now. Recently, I've been using it for more things at home as well. I've created quite...

I recently was building a WPF solution where I had a couple RadioButtons that each represented a particular state of the data. Each RadioButton had its IsChecked dependency property bound to a property on my DataContext. And they were each bound to a...

It's been over a year since my last post so I figured its just the right time to write a new one. As you have most likely heard, the Microsoft Business Framework project I had been working on for several years was cancelled. Now I'm back in the Business...

I like to think of software design as cracking a code. You keep working on the design over and over until you've finally cracked the code and an elegant design emerges. I believe the solution exists out "there" and I just have to find it. Albeit there...

There's been an e-mail thread going around in an internal Microsoft Business Framework (MBF) discussion list of the best way to handle concurrency conflicts. Someone brought up the novel idea of asking users what they would like to happen. So that's what...

When first becoming a Microsoft employee, I was excited to get to see and use many of our products before they were released to the public. Most people love to be the one of the first at trying out brand new software. After a while, the novelty wore off...

For all the application developers out there, this is a request for comments. In business apps there are generally two types of relationships: compositions and associations. Compositions are tightly-coupled relationships where the composition's lifetime...