Visual Studio Lightswitch
This has been needed for the past 20 years and now Microsoft has finally stepped up to the plate and will cover the gap between tech savy business users and developers. I can not tell you how many Access Databases, Monster Excel Spreadsheets and Microsoft Word Macro’s I’ve seen/written/replaced over the past 25 years but it is in the hundreds. Most of these were started for the right reasons, even though Microsoft office probably wasn’t the best platform. The challenge is simple to articulate – I’m a business user, I don’t have a staff of developers, I know enough to be dangerous and I want to keep my paycheck. Microsoft Access was pretty close – but it couldn’t make the leap and required some pretty specific knowledge.
Microsoft announced Visual Studio Lightswitch at the VS Live conference – a solution designed to bridge that gap. The application is a part of Microsoft Development Platform Visual Studio and promises to allow the savvy business user to build apps for desktops or cloud delivery by pulling data from Databases, SharePoint as well as integrate with Microsoft’s Cloud solution; Azure. It seems obvious that since this is part of Visual Studio when the app gets too big for the business user, I’m guessing (and I hope it does this) the app can be put into the hands of a experienced developer. This will probably drive the developer’s crazy, but it certainly will be fun to watch.
