LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup- October 2013

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A while back I started posting a monthly 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 .

This month was an exciting month - we did it! We released Visual Studio 2013. In just a little over a year we released another major version of Visual Studio and we couldn’t have done it without you.

Visual Studio 2013 Released! – Thank You LightSwitch Community

On October 17th we released Visual Studio 2013. We are super excited to get this release out the door and into your hands. Visual Studio 2013 contains a ton of new tools for developers to build best of breed, modern applications and services.

Download Visual Studio 2013

On behalf of the LightSwitch team I want to thank all of you who reported bugs and suggestions through our forum, connect, UserVoice, our team blog, and emails to the team.

And we’ve been cranking out content on the team blog on all our new features. For starters, all the goodness we released starting in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 is also part of Visual Studio 2013. This means you can build cross-browser, mobile-first HTML5 apps that can run on any modern touch device and optionally publish these apps to a SharePoint 2013 / Office 365 app catalog.

In addition, you’ll find a lot of new LightSwitch features in this release, things like:LS_Understanding_Image1

Also check out the updated content on the Visual Studio LightSwitch Developer Center.

LightSwitch Extensibility Toolkit for Visual Studio 2013

With the official release of Visual Studio 2013 we also released an updated LightSwitch Extensibility Toolkit for VS2013. This allows you to create LightSwitch extensions for Visual Studio 2013.

Download: LightSwitch Extensibility Toolkit for Visual Studio 2013

For more information, samples and resources for learning how to build LightSwitch extensions please see: Extending Visual Studio LightSwitch

Beginning LightSwitch Series for Visual Studio 2013

In October I also (re)-started a very popular beginner series for those of you just getting started with LightSwitch. This time though, I’m focusing on the HTML client and Visual Studio 2013. So far:

Keep an eye out for the rest of the tutorials right here: Beginning LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2013 series

Visual Studio Virtual Launch Event – Save the Date! November 13th

The entire Visual Studio team has created a bunch of awesome content, live streaming keynotes, and on demand videos for the virtual launch event that you can watch right here on November 13th:

https://events.visualstudio.com/

We’ll be broadcasting the keynote live, and the Virtual Launch will be packed full of product demos and customer success stories. And, for the first time, it will be available in multiple languages and on multiple devices!

LightSwitch at Silicon Valley Code Camp

On October 5th I spoke at Silicon Valley Code Camp -- the biggest code camp in the world! I delivered two sessions that were very well attended -- I think the room held about 50 people and both sessions were filled. Thanks all for coming!

In the first session I focused on building HTML5-based business apps with LightSwitch and deploying them to Azure. And the second I focused on the new Cloud Business App project in Visual Studio 2013 that streamlines the way you build custom business apps for SharePoint 2013 / Office 365.

Read my trip report and download the slides and demos: Trip Report -- Silicon Valley Code Camp

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Happy Halloween from Xpert360!

Keeping the Xpert360 tradition, they released another colorful theme for the holidays —this time a pumpkin theme for Halloween (my favorite holiday of the year). Check it out!

Lightning Series - Pumpkin Theme CE

Check out all of Xpert360’s awesome extensions here.

 

 

More Notable Content this Month

Did I miss anything significant? Post a comment below!

Extensions released this month ( see over 100 of them here! ):

Samples ( see over 100 of them here! ):

Team Articles:

Community Videos:

Robert MacLean spoke at TechDays in in Johannesburg and Cape Town in October. If you missed it, check out his LightSwitch talk on YouTube!

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Community Articles:

This month I’d like to give a shout out to a couple new bloggers, The LOB Factory and Blog of an IT Guy who have been posting about some more advanced LightSwitch topics. Also a TON of content pumping out this month from LightSwitchHelpWebsite.com (as always). Great job and keep it up!

Forum Answerers

Thanks to all our LightSwitch forums contributors! Thank you for helping make the LightSwitch community a better place. It’s selfless dedication like this that makes our community rock.

Top 5 forum answerers in October:

Display Name Answers Posts
ADefwebserver 19 71
Justin Anderson 18 48
Xpert360 14 73
Angie xu 14 47
Yunjie Pei      14 40

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, #VS2013 #LightSwitch)

Enjoy!