Visual Studio LightSwitch is a relatively young technology. Its supporters, have various reasons for supporting it. For some it has allowed them to realize their dream application, for others it has allowed them to finally complete that long suffering project.

For myself, my primary motivation is that it allows me to actually complete projects in a reasonable amount of time (and time is money). In most cases I can complete a project 95%+ faster than if I coded the exact same requirements in ASP.NET Web Forms.

The Silverlight Match Last year, however, there has been a disquiet among my fellow LightSwitch enthusiasts. Silverlight's largest detractor was no longer outsiders but Microsoft:

Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted No plug-ins allowed on Windows on ARM...

App inventor is a program that allows you to easily make applications that run on the Android system. This includes the Amazon Kindle Fire. Here are some links to get you started with App Inventor:

Setup

Set up your computer. Run the emulator. Set up your phone. Build your first app.

Tutorials

Learn the basics of App Inventor by working through these tutorials.

Reference Documentation

Look up how specific components and blocks work. Read about concepts in App Inventor, like displaying lists and accessing images and sounds.

You can use the server that is set-up at MIT...

At the Microsoft MVP Summit 2012 I had the pleasure to interview Beth Massi.

 

 

When I received my Amazon Kindle Fire for Christmas I immediately wanted to make programs for it. I am a Microsoft stack programmer and creating Android programs in Java using Eclipse is new to me…

If you stop and think about it, an automobile is an amazing thing. The automobile brings together several key elements such as cost, fuel, rubber tires. The result was a massive increase in productivity for the world...

I got a comment on a Blog I wrote on the LightSwitchHelpWebsite.com:

I found it much easier to write application in Visual Studio 2008 than Visual Studio LightSwitch. In LightSwitch, It is has to find any form objects, like button, radio buttons, check boxes, etc. Besides, I could not find any component that I can drop on the screen. Anyway, it seems like a pain to me. Maybe I need a better book. I will still keep taking a shot at LightSwitch until I get it...

Trust me, this is crazy talk .

But, the odd thing is that I feel I totally understand where poster is coming from.



...

But First, The JavaScript I just looked at the latest JQuery release notes and noted the issues that they had to fix due to web browser compatibility issues. We simply must believe that these people are at the top of their game. If they have this many issues to deal with, aren’t I crazy if I even think of writing any JavaScript without using JQuery?

The rule I follow is, keep the JavaScript to a minimum, and always use JQuery or some other big JavaScript library. The reason is web browser “incompatibilities” and it is very costly and is an issue that is not changing any time soon.

IT is fueled on the money it saves for businesses with the Line Of Business (LOB) applications that we programmers create. However, lately, IT and the programmers creating the LOB apps, cost too much money. The reason, the JavaScript.

JavaScript wasn’t so costly back when we used it to validate date fields and we only had to worry about IE...

We finally know what is going on with Windows 8 and that while there is XAML + C#, there is no Silverlight as we know it except in ‘Legacy mode’...

Most Hack-A-Thons are a grind because to give the contestants time to come up with something decent you need to give them at least a day.

Not so with LightSwitch. One of the selling points of LightSwitch is that development is so fast. With LightSwitch you can give contestants only 1 hour...