The Visual Studio LightSwitch HTML Client will connect to any SignalR service, allowing you to create state of the art applications…

LightSwitch in Action By Dan Beall and Greg Lutz You tell LightSwitch what you want the data to look like and what you want the interface to do and it wires it all up and gives you a finished, professional-grade application. LightSwitch is, at its essence, a forms-over-data application. You describe the data store and design the forms and it does all the plumbing required to make them work together. This article, based on chapter 1 of LightSwitch in Action, explains why and how you would want to use LightSwitch…

 

I’ll be speaking at Visual Studio Live!, March 25-29 in Las Vegas, NV http://bit.ly/VLSPK32Reg.  Surrounded by your fellow IT professionals, Visual Studio Live! provides you with immediately usable IT education that will keep you relevant in the workforce…

 

LightSwitch provides for creating Data Sources in several ways. In the case of an existing database you would typically either specify the database itself or a WCF RIA Service.

But sometimes neither is feasible. I was confronted with a database with no primary keys and incredibly wide tables – so wide that I got error messages about it. And you can’t really do much with a database that has no primary keys. Also modifying the schema was not an option.

This actually turned out to be quite liberating. The reason we wanted to access the database outside of the legacy application it was designed for was to

• Provide views of the data that the legacy application did not.
• Add additional columns

By extracting the data into another database we could

• Eliminate literally hundreds of columns (Yes, I do mean literally)
• Create primary keys
• Create relationships with referential integrity through foreign keys

 

In this article we will create an end-to-end HTML application in Visual Studio LightSwitch. The purpose is to demonstrate how LightSwitch allows you to create professional business applications that would take a developer days to create. With LightSwitch you can create such applications in under an hour…

In a previous post I suggested a way to override default LightSwitch add/edit behavior. In this post I will suggest an override to default delete behavior.

It has happened many times to delete entries, only to get an error message, when trying to save, informing me about reference constraints being violated and the action cannot be completed. This is not much of problem when you try to delete one record (apart from the fact this message is ugly and not one that I would allow my end users to deal with, for that matter). But when trying to delete many records you have no clue which was the one (or more) record(s) that cannot be deleted. In this case all you can do is delete-save until you find the record that cannot be deleted. And when you find it, you have to refresh your screen or undo the changes of the current record (a future article will suggest a way to do this).

What I needed...