Xpert360 has recently released AIDE for LightSwitch, a Visual Studio extension that advances the LightSwitch design experience…

This control has a long history. In brief, this issue started back in September 2011 when LightSwitch team member, Karol Zadora published code that allowed you to display hierarchal data in a nested tree. I covered it in the article:  Tree Control: Hierarchical Data with LightSwitch.

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In many ways the ComponentOne Scheduler LightSwitch Extension validates the brilliance and promise of Visual Studio LightSwitch. This LightSwitch Extension allows a non-programmer the ability to create complex highly customizable applications, which combine and orchestrate several data sources.

ComponentOne allowed me to preview several Beta versions of the groundbreaking control. The control is due to be released 12/14/2011, so this preview is very close...

If you are not a Silverlight programmer, LightSwitch is still easy to use. You just need to use LightSwitch Control Extensions. It is important to note the difference between a Silverlight Custom Control, and a LightSwitch Control Extension.

Karol Zadora-Przylecki covers the difference in the article “Using Custom Controls to Enhance Your LightSwitch Application UI” (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lightswitch/archive/2011/01/13/using-custom-controls-to-enhance-lightswitch-application-ui-part-1.aspx).

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Note: You must have Visual Studio Professional (or higher) to complete this tutorial

Telerik has a differentiating LightSwitch control in their Rich Text Editor Control. It allows you to create compelling LightSwitch applications. It allows your end-users to create, import and export Microsoft Word documents. It also contains many other features.

In this example, we will build a small application that allows rich notes to be entered for people.

First, Install the Telerik controls...

ComponentsOne’s OLAP For LightSwitch, is a “pivoting data analyzer” control that plugs into LightSwitch. It has been called the ‘Killer App’ for LightSwitch.



You can download the demo at this link:

http://www.componentone.com/SuperProducts/OLAPLightSwitch/



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From: Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Extensions Cookbook.doc © 2011 Microsoft Corporation NOTE: See the updated article: Creating a Minimal LightSwitch Shell A LightSwitch application runs in a “Shell”. You can create your own Shell.

The first step is to download the “Cook Book”...

The Document Toolkit for LightSwitch is a commercial LightSwitch control extension. It is one of the first to become available, and is a great example of an extension that allows you to do amazing things easily with LightSwitch.



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The LightSwitch filter extension is really cool. It is one of the LightSwitch features that has no comparison. It is a feature that, if you decide not to use LightSwitch for a project, you lose that feature completely.



First, we download and install the extension at this link:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Filter-Control-for-Visual-90fb8e93



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