Visual Studio – A new family member called LightSwitch

Microsoft has announced at the VSLive! event the birth of a new member in the Visual Studio family, called Visual Studio LightSwitch.

LightSwitch is the simplest way to build business applications for the desktop and cloud. At their core, most end user business applications combine two things:  data + screens.  LightSwitch is optimized around making these two things very simple.  Let’s walk through a simple example which demonstrates how easy it is to get going.

LightSwitch is a stand alone Visual Studio product (it will also be available in future versions of Visual Studio Professional and above).  VS Professional gives you a lot of options for building your application, including being able to build top tier enterprise wide apps.  This is very powerful but also presents you with a lot of options to sort out up front as you contemplate your architecture.  With LightSwitch we make it really simple with two choices:  VB or C#!

By default LightSwitch produces a desktop application.  This kind of app can work very easily with local data and can integrate with Office as mentioned above.  Some times you will also want to give access to the application in the browser.

More details: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2010/08/03/introducing-microsoft-visual-studio-lightswitch.aspx