LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2013 Preview!

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This week at the \\BUILD conference the previews of Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 were released for developers to test drive as well as some awesome new updates to Windows Azure.

I encourage you to read about some of the new features of these releases here:

The Day 2 keynote this morning also highlighted some upcoming features for building business applications on top of Office 365 as well as our commitment to .NET. This was also reiterated in Soma’s post this morning:

Of course the LightSwitch team also has some great new features in VS2013 that we’ve added based on customer feedback! And if you saw the keynote, you probably saw some familiar designers in the demo ;-). See the LightSwitch Team announcement here:

The team will be rolling out detailed posts on all the new features in the coming weeks on the LightSwitch Team Blog. To recap, here are some of the biggies:

  • You no longer need to switch between Logical View and File View because all your project content is available under one view in Solution Explorer
  • LightSwitch projects work more seamlessly with the IDE, so using the scoping, search, and browse history features are all now available in your LightSwitch projects.
  • You can view multiple designers at the same time. Each screen, table, and query is now opened in its own document tab.
  • Improved team development! Each entity, screen, and query is now persisted in its own .lsml model file, dramatically reducing the likelihood of merge conflicts when multiple developers work on the same project. We’ve also improved compatibility with existing source code control providers.
  • Intrinsic database management with linked database project, providing the ability to generate reference data and make schema enhancements.
  • Improved JavaScript IntelliSense, as well as notable improvements to the core JavaScript experience such as code editor and DOM Explorer enhancements (more info here).
  • API support for refreshing data on lists and screens in the runtime app.
  • Integration with other Visual Studio features, such as Team Build and Code Analysis.

And of course there are fixes for many issues customers reported. I encourage you to test drive the VS2013 preview – LightSwitch was already a super productive development environment, and it’s gotten even better in this release!

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More Important Resources

As you dig into the preview please make sure to…

Have fun and Enjoy!