After seeing an announcement, I decided to download and test Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011. It happened to become a longer than expected task.
Before installing this version, make sure to remove LightSwitch beta version. Uninstalling the LightSwitch may take 5..10 minutes.
Other prerequisites:
- .NET Framework 4.0 -- otherwise you'll see no LightSwitch project templates in the VS
- Visual Studio 2010 with SP1 installed -- another 30 to 60 minutes of your valuable time
- SQL Server Express
The latter is the most annoying. On my main computer I have SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition installed, which is an equivalent of the Enterprise version. This appears to be insufficient. The animal still wants to have SQL Server Express simply because "SQL Express is a LightSwitch prerequisite on the development machine." Supposedly it stores development configuration/metadata there. Fortunately, application deployment can be made to a machine with any SQL Server 2005+ version installed.
Congratulations Microsoft for another wise step. It will certainly boost the user base of your new product.
Data source can only include tables and views, no stored procedures and functions -- that's another smart decision. Probably Microsoft does not believe that business end-users are smart enough to deal with these two concepts.
May be I am too sceptical...
