What is New in LightSwitch of Visual Studio 2012

As we know, Visual Studio 2012 has been released on Aug 15, 2012 I just wanted to discuss about the new features of LightSwitch.

In Visual Studio 2012, LightSwitch is included as a core part and we can create the LightSwitch application from Visual Studio 2012 IDE. LightSwitch will be available as a Project Template group Node in the Visual Studio 2012.

New LightSwitch Architecture

Visual Studio 2012 LightSwitch has a lot of enhancements including OData Services which leads to define the new architecture for the LightSwitch Application Development.

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is a development environment designed to simplify and shorten the development of typical forms-over-data applications for businesses. Regardless of your development skills—whether you're a beginner or an experienced developer—LightSwitch enables you to quickly create professional-quality business applications and data services. – From MSDN

You can get more details about the LightSwitch Architecture, please have a look at MSDN.

New Enhancements in LightSwitch 2012

There are ton of new features included in the Visual Studio 2012 LightSwitch. We will briefly discuss about all the new features of the new enhanced LightSwitch.

Connecting with OData Services:

LightSwitch 2012 now supports Open Data Protocol Services.

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. – From OData

We can represent the data from a published Visual Studio LightSwitch web application as an OData Data source which can consumed by other applications.

Formatting Numbers & Dates:

We can easily format the Numbers and Dates using Format Pattern property in LightSwitch 2012. This Format Pattern Property is available only for the particular data types.

New Data Types in LightSwitch:

Visual Studio LightSwitch team has introduced two more Data Types namely Percent and Web Address. Here the Decimal will be treated as Percent business type and the String will be treated as Web Address.

Static Label & Image Control:

LightSwitch 2012 includes two more controls which can be used to display the content statically without binding data. These controls can be used to display the static texts about the organization and logo.

Improved Application Security:

In LightSwitch Business Application we can apply security by two ways like Forms Authentication and Windows Authentication, In Windows Authentication it is possible to provide the Roles & Permissions to Active Directory User Groups.

Download Visual Studio 2012

You can download the Visual Studio 2012 90 days trail version from the Microsoft site.

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us/downloads

Summary

Well, we done with the brief intro about the new features of Visual Studio LightSwitch 2012.

Thanks for spending your precious time here. Please provide your valuable feedbacks and comments, which make me to give a better article next time.

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