Earlier this month (August 2010) Microsoft has introduced a new Visual Studio family member, it’s Visual Studio LightSwitch.
Visual Studio LightSwitch is RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool that can be used to build WPF and Silverlight applications in an easy way.
Don’t expect me to explain the features in this post, it will be too long 🙂 instead please watch the following videos:
- http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dan/Jay-Schmelzer-Introducing-Visual-Studio-LightSwitch/
- http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/funkyonex/Visual-Studio-LightSwitch-Beyond-the-Basics/
Okay, done watching? 🙂
This kind of tool is not new. Many 3rd party software companies has built similar tool and my favorite was Iron Speed Designer but the output is ASP.NET website rather than WPF or Silverlight.
Iron Speed Designer was great. I used that tool in 2007 to 2009 because it was the main dev tool at the company I used to work. But the downside is the cost. It’s too expensive to get the full features. For a single seat of Enterprise Edition it cost $3,975.
This Visual Studio LightSwitch is absolutely a great tool and it absolutely has good market prospect. It’s a very good decision from Microsoft to develop this tool.
I hope Microsoft can release this tool in an affordable price. If that will happen, I can say “Visual Studio LightSwitch is Iron Speed Designer KILLER”.
PS: The free public beta will be available on 23 August 2010.
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