Introduction
This article provides a walkthrough of LightSwitch. We will have a look at the innovation of business applications. What doest that mean now a days? We will see what LightSwitch is and the architecture and features of LightSwitch applications.
- Business Applications
- What is LightSwitch?
- LightSwitch architechture and features
Business Applications
We have applications that end-users think of often in terms of the UI for the forms interface for HTML or WPF style in Windows and we also have a set of services in those business applications and some data.
The services might include things such as Rules, validations of entites or form inputs and may have security. Data may be a database such as SQL Server might also be a SharePoint or we can access them through services (Restful services or other type of web services).
These are the applications we are probably building now a days. We may or may not call them business applications using the same terminology but there are typical applications where we have data on sevices. Maybe a user interface that allows somebody to work with those things.
What is LightSwitch?
LightSwitch is designed specifically for building the preceding type of business applications.and applying modern technologies using things like Odata and HTML using Silverlight and backend tools like Entity Framework. For the purpose of abstracting away the common tasks, so to make development experience to focus on what does our application do.
Architecture of a LightSwitch Application
Let's look at what's going on behind the scenes. When we build a LightSwitch application its logically divided into the 3 tiers client, middle and data tier as shown above.
On the client tier we have tools like Silverlight or HTML to build our user interface and also a data workspace, essentially a control space used to manage our data contexts. In the middle tier we have ASP.NET hosting some web services and we have various data sources where our application is gonna speak to.
Evolution of LightSwitch Application
Summary
In this article I have explained LightSwitch. I hope this article gives you some brief introduction to LightSwitch.