If you have been off-line today you probably missed the hot news of the day. Microsoft Visual Studio Lightswitch.
If you need some context, take a look at the official link to the announcement: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2010/08/03/introducing-microsoft-visual-studio-lightswitch.aspx
Have you saw it? Cool. Read on.
Let's face it. We devs tend to be really suspicious when we see magic things happen. Stuff that are out of our control, that we can't see.
From what I understood while Lightswitch is not targeted at dev's per se, it will welcome them. What I see is a RAD tool to build data aware LOB apps that can target a specific problem using quite sophisticated technology under the covers. EF, RIA, WCF, SL.... a lot of stuff is been included here and I will risk it to say that not many dev's have mastered it all.
Being able to target windows or web with a property at project level is no small think. Being able to generate visual appealing user friendly forms is no small thing. I see a lot of potential in Lightswitch.
Now.... how would I use it? I can see myself creating small internal projects, use it to create a functional prototype or even creating a fully functional LOB app and eventually take it to VS pro and making use of the code base, continue to evolve it without Lightswitch IDE. Why not?
It’s a bit soon to see exactly what will be possible to do and what not, but one thing is certain... it will open the door for new people to build apps that don’t have a strong dev experience but that have the capability to understand business logic and that know what they need.
This has happen a few times in the past. Access and VBA made it possible for a lot of non devs to actually build simple applications to improve their productivity without spending huge sums of money. And it actually worked.
Sure a lot of bad apps where created and a lot of us suffered with this apps because we had to maintain them when the "dev" was no longer available. But we also had huge business opportunities migrating these "bad crafted" apps.
There is however a huge difference from Access + VBA and this new tool. The technology decisions, the way the app is crafted to enable n-tier scenarios, the way data access is done, validation, transactions, etc.... is already built in. I believe that MS made a huge effort to create good code and used good practices on code generation. And this makes me think that we may have a tool here that while is targeted to non-devs, it will welcome us to dig in and not only use it in some scenarios but also to take advantage of our knowledge to extend the code to our needs. Depending on how the code is done, it may as well possible to create a prototype using this tool, and then move to a normal vs pro project and go from there.
I'm curious to see how MS solved some issues, how they implemented the code to do some of the features and how they glued everything together in a way that allows us to target web or windows with a click of a button.
I would advise anyone that may have suspicions about this new product, and that only sees a RAD tool that will potentiate the flood of bad apps… to wait… download the beta when available and give it a try. I will and I’ll be probably blogging about this again.
My 2 cents.
To anyone interested on this subject, take a look at Andrew Brust blog here also: http://bit.ly/9cA7vB