Microsoft has introduced a new easy way to create Windows and Web based applications. When we develop applications much of the code we write for CRUD operations and data validation. LightSwitch makes this really easier by providing a very friendly manner.

You can download the LightSwitch beta 1and try it out. Download the LightSwitch Training kit. (Training Kit only provides VB.NET samples ).

LightSwitch is built on the Silverlight out of the browser feature. It has specific data types like phone number, email and others. These types are transparent to the database since a typical RDBMS ( in this case SQL Server) doesn’t have those types. So if you create table with email type in the LightSwitch it makes the SQL data type as varchar and it keeps the data type as email. So this makes LightSwitch to validate the string as email and store it in a typical varchar value in the database.

This works similar to the validation module we have in the ASP.NET where the validation is done through a Javascript code. Adobe Dreamweaver’s Spry also does the same thing.

But LightSwitch has more cool features like guided database relations, screen selections and connecting to external live data sources like bing maps.

Download the module and have fun