LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–January 2013

Last year 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 all out here: LightSwitch Community & Content Rollups.

Wow it’s still strange to me to be typing 2013. I feel like we should be driving around in flying cars, our sidewalks all moving walkways, and rapid transit means getting into a giant air tube that spits you across a city. It’s funny what we thought the future world would look like 20 years ago… Oh well! At least we’re making progress on the next version of LightSwitch!

Getting Started with LightSwitch and Office 365

This month the team continues to focus and build the next version that will support mobile devices via JQueryMobile & HTML5 as well as support the new SharePoint apps model in Office 365. With the release of Preview 2 and its SharePoint support, I’ve been seeing an interesting cross-pollination of folks posting & tweeting about LightSwitch. I’ve also seen a considerable uptick in traffic to our getting started content. It looks like the SharePoint community is starting to take a serious look at LightSwitch. With that in mind, if you’re just starting with LightSwitch here are some great resources to check out:

• Beginning LightSwitch: Getting Started 
• LightSwitch "How Do I" Video Training
• Getting Started with the LightSwitch HTML Client Preview 2
• Building a SharePoint App with LightSwitch

If, on the other hand, you are a seasoned LightSwitch developer but are just getting started with SharePoint development, here are some resources that really have helped me.

• Build apps for Office and SharePoint
• Sign up for an Office 365 Developer Site
• Apps for SharePoint overview
• 50+ SharePoint apps samples 

Community Rock Stars & New Bloggers

With the new year I’d like to give another shout out to folks that have continuously helped nurture the LightSwitch Community. It’s volunteers like you, with your tireless efforts to help others, that makes the development world a great place to be. Whether that’s writing books, moderating the forums, blogging, or running entire websites, your contributions are truly appreciated. Particularly….

• Alessandro Del Sole
• Jan Van der Haegen
• Michael Washington
• Paul Van Bladel
• Yann Duran

We’d also like to welcome a couple new faces to the LightSwitch blogsphere that have popped up with some good content so far. Keep it up guys!

Chris Finlan from SAP has started a new blog with some great tips & tricks. Check out how to incorporate SAP data into LightSwitch using SAP Netweaver Gateway.
Blog: https://www.thepoweroflightswitch.com/
Twitter: @cmfinlan

Laurentz Tonniau has been on twitter for a while but he just started blogging! He’s been a user of LS for over a year and has written 3 large ERP systems with it. Check out his first post where he talks about his projects and experiences.
Blog: https://www.firmware.be/blog/
Twitter: @LaurentzT

Do you know of others in the LightSwitch community that you rely on to help you? Add a comment below and let me know!

More Notable Content this Month

Samples ( see all 96 of them here ): Check out the most popular LightSwitch samples this month..

• Survey App Tutorial: Developing a SharePoint Application Using LightSwitch
• LightSwitch HTML Client Tutorial - Contoso Moving

Team Articles:  

• Most Popular LightSwitch Team Blog Posts of 2012
• Avoid LightSwitch URI Casing Issue Using the URL Rewrite Module
• Enabling .NET Framework 4.5 on LightSwitch Server Projects
• Get Started Building SharePoint Apps in Minutes with LightSwitch
• Sending Email from a LightSwitch SharePoint App using Exchange Online
• Theming a LightSwitch SharePoint App with ThemeRoller
• Visualizing List Data using a Map Control

Community Articles:  

• A downloadable sample app for integrating SignalR in a LightSwitch project.
• A sql script for creating a LightSwitch user in the sql database.
• Creating A Desktop Experience Using Wijmo Grid In LightSwitch HTML Client
• Decently hosting full frame a LightSwitch browser app in an IFrame
• Edit records in a LightSwitch Grid directly from Excel
• Full Control LightSwitch (ServerApplicationContext And Generic File Handlers And Ajax Calls)
• Introduction to SAP Netweaver Gateway - special guest post
• Lightswitch direct print without user interaction
• Make LightSwitch Talk!
• Publishing your HTML5 app with a certificate
• Saving Data In The Visual Studio LightSwitch HTML Client (Including Automatic Saves)
• Self-reporting via Excel power pivot in highly deferred execution mode.
• Start of a LightSwitch Blog
• Switch… On…
• Unit testing in LightSwitch (part 1)
• Unit Testing in LightSwitch (part 2)
• Using a custom edit screen in Lightswitch 2012 instead of the default modal dialog window
• Why are serious .Net line of business app developers not embracing today LightSwitch?
• Why serious .Net developers should stop building LOB “frameworks” which are pretentious on the outside and simple on the inside.

Top Forum Answerers

Thanks to all our contributors to the LightSwitch forums on MSDN. Thank you for helping make the LightSwitch community a better place. Another huge shout out to Yann Duran who consistently provides help in our General forum as well as Paul Van Bladel and Xpert360 this month!

Top 5 forum answerers in January:

Keep up the great work guys!

LightSwitch Team Community Sites

Become a fan of Visual Studio LightSwitch on Facebook. Have fun and interact with us on our wall. Check out the cool stories and resources. Here are some other places you can find the LightSwitch team:

LightSwitch MSDN Forums
LightSwitch Developer Center
LightSwitch Team Blog
LightSwitch on Twitter (@VSLightSwitch, #VS2012 #LightSwitch)

Enjoy!