LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–January 2012

Last Fall I started posting a rollup of interesting community happenings, content, samples and extensions popping up around Visual Studio LightSwitch. If you missed those rollups you can check them out here:

Looks like folks took a few well-deserved days to ramp back into the groove after the holidays (including myself). But there were still a lot of awesome things around LightSwitch this month, especially the number of submissions The Code Project had in the LightSwitch Star Contest. A lot of really interesting applications and some great case studies for LightSwitch as well as some for Azure. Check them out…

“LightSwitch Star” Contest

“LightSwitch Star” Contest on CodeProject

In November The Code Project launched the “LightSwitch Star” contest. They’re looking for apps that show off the most productivity in a business as well as apps that use extensions in a unique, innovative way. Prizes are given away each month. Soon they will announce the January winners as well as the two grand prize winners of an ASUS U31SD-DH31 Laptop !

Check out all the submission we had in January and make sure to log onto Code Project and vote for your favorites. Here’s a breakdown of the 13 apps that were submitted in January (see all 34 apps that have been submitted here). There are some very creative “business apps” here – like a campaign manager for Dungeons & Dragons!

There are a lot of really interesting real-world LightSwitch production applications that were submitted. Some departmental apps, a few personal apps, some enterprise apps as well as a couple start-up companies. There are also some great case studies here for Azure, in particular:

Developer Center Updates

Learn Page Updates

In December I kicked off a series aimed at beginner developers just getting started with LightSwitch and was featured in the MSDN Flash Newsletter. In January we updated the Learn page of the Developer Center to feature this series and it’s been getting some great traffic!

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I also released the completed source code for the sample we build in the series: Beginning LightSwitch - Address Book Sample

How Do I Videos – Learning Made Easier

We also updated all the How Do I video pages to show the sequential list of videos so that you can easily get to the previous and next videos in the series. This makes it a lot easier to navigate through the over 20 videos in the correct order. Just click into any video page like this one and you will see the video navigator at the bottom of the page.

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Notable Content this Month

Here’s some more of the fun things the team and community released in January.

Extensions released in January (see all 73 of them here!):

The team also released a control extension sample that you can learn from. Check out the announcement on the team blog:  Many-to-Many Control Released!

Build your own extensions by visiting the LightSwitch Extensibility page on the LightSwitch Developer Center.

Team Articles:
Community Articles:
Presentations:
Samples (see all of them here):
LightSwitch Team Community Sites

The Visual Studio LightSwitch Facebook Page has been increasing in activity thanks to you all. Become a fan! Have fun and interact with us on our wall. Check out the cool stories and resources.

Also here are some other places you can find the LightSwitch team:

LightSwitch MSDN Forums
LightSwitch Developer Center
LightSwitch Team Blog
LightSwitch on Twitter (@VSLightSwitch, #VisualStudio #LightSwitch)

Join Us!

The community has been using the hash tag #LightSwitch on twitter when posting stuff so it’s easier for me to catch it (although this is a common English word so you may end up with a few weird ones ;-)). Join the conversation! And if I missed anything please add a comment to the bottom of this post and let us know!

Enjoy!