Microsoft introduces Rapid Application Development (RAD) with LightSwitch release

MS has just announced RAD with LightSwitch. Here is my first peek at it, as I walk through it. Once you go to MSDN and download the package and install it, you will see it manifest as two project templates in VS IDE.

The basic idea is to provide the ability to rapidly build screens which are bound to data sources. This enables a kind of RAD that was also available with Oracle Application Builder which enabled similar scenarios.

OOB the picture above shows the different screens one could add to the solution and then wire up to different data sources. The screen take the usual partial class approach which is now widely used in the WPF, SL and Windows Phone project templates. Also the screen layouts are changeable and you could write code for various screen based events. This is shown below.

Once you wire up the screens' it should be possible to flow from screen to screen depending on your application requirements and as well as pass parameters from one screen to another. I have not explored this part of it yet.