In previous posts I made reference to views (DB or RIA) as an alternative (amongst other well-known potentials of views) to search and sort against fields that would normally be relations (lookups or however you want to call them).

From the very beginning I had an issue with SQL Server views imported to LS. LightSwitch had a very strange way to define the primary keys of the views. These “inferred” primary keys are most of the time very complex combined keys. And this is not an issue actually until you decide to add a relationship between this view (which 99% of the times has only one field as actual primary key) and another table. Then you realize this, otherwise benign, complex primary key is an issue (to say the least).

It was only recently, in this thread,...

One of the greatest benefits to using LightSwitch, is that it automatically manages data integrity when multiple users are updating data. It also provides a method to resolve any errors that it detects.

The first issue is very important, and with most web applications, it is not handled. Simply, the last person to save a record overwrites any other changes, even if those other changes were made after the user initially pulled up the record. The second issue, a method to resolve this situation, is priceless, because the code to create the “conflict resolution process” is considerable.

This blog post does not contain any code examples, because there is no code for you to write to get all these features!



...

I was surprised when I was chosen to present at Visual Studio Live in Las Vegas early this year. I had sent in 3 proposed topics months before, and the one chosen was Advanced LightSwitch Programming. After being informed of my selection to speak at the conference, I sat down to create the presentation and ran into a huge problem. There is just too much to cover about advanced LightSwitch programming to cram into 75 minutes.

I really agonized over this, and re-wrote the presentation several times. In the end, I spent over 40 hours preparing and practicing the presentation. The only structure I was happy with, was coving LightSwitch programming using three concepts that I felt were important to successful LightSwitch programming.

These are presented in order of importance.

Concept #1 - LightSwitch requires you to only write the code that only you can write Examples of the concept:

A calculated field that shows the course and the teacher...

An End-To-End LightSwitch Example In this article we will create an end-to-end application in LightSwitch. The purpose is to demonstrate how LightSwitch allows you to create professional business applications that would take a single developer weeks to create. With LightSwitch you can create such applications in under an hour.

You can download LightSwitch at http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch.

The Scenario In this example, we will be tasked with producing...