Live from TechEd Europe: LightSwitch HTML Client Preview and Visual Studio 2012 Tools for SharePoint

This morning I presented the keynote at TechEd Europe 2012 in Amsterdam, and shared some updates on our tools. If you’re not attending the event in person, you can still tune in online. The keynote video recording is available on-demand on Channel9.

The first announcement you’re likely to hear about is our LightSwitch HTML Client Preview release...

LightSwitch HTML Client Preview Availability

At TechEd North America 2012, I showed how LightSwitch is embracing a standards based approach with HTML5, JavaScript and CSS, so you can build companion touch-centric apps that run on multiple devices. This approach allows you to take advantage of the same backend services you’re using across your applications, as well as the productivity gains of LightSwitch.

We’re excited to announce that the LightSwitch HTML Client Preview is available today for MSDN subscribers, and will be available publicly on Thursday June 28th!  To learn more about the release, provide feedback, or ask questions, please visit the LightSwitch Developer Center, team blog, and forums.

Visual Studio 2012 Tools for SharePoint 2010

This morning I also demoed SharePoint tools. With Visual Studio 2012 RC, we’re delivering another compelling release for writing SharePoint 2010 solutions. We’ve developed a rich experience for creating SharePoint lists and content types, so that you no longer need to deal with the complex schema or error-prone hand-editing of XML. Our new SharePoint List Designer allows you to visually and accurately define new lists and content types:

sptools

We’re also working hard to make sure that you get the most accurate IntelliSense when working with SharePoint solutions.  When developing a sandboxed solution, we now filter to the APIs that are available in production, so that you get immediate feedback on the right APIs to use.  We’ve also augmented IntelliSense to parse JavaScript files that are stored in the SharePoint content database, and now provide IntelliSense for the functions and members in those files.

Visual Studio 2012 RC includes several enhancements for Office 365 development, where SharePoint solutions run in a sandboxed process.  For example, the Visual Web Part template has been updated to be compatible with the sandbox and can now be safely deployed to Office 365.  We’ve also introduced a new Silverlight Web Part template, in case you prefer to define your Web Parts in XAML.  Finally, we’ve improved the experience of deploying sandboxed solutions with a new Publish dialog, which allows you to directly publish to Office 365 or any other remote SharePoint Server.

ALM support for SharePoint development continues to improve in the Visual Studio 2012 RC.  We’ve expanded our profiling support so that you can get rich information about the bottlenecks in both farm and sandboxed solutions . I also announced previously that we’ll continue to add ALM support in the first Ultimate Feature Pack, which will feature unit testing support as well as support for SharePoint load testing.

Conclusion

I look forward to hearing from you as you have an opportunity to try out these features.

Enjoy the event, and make sure to check out the view the videos online as they become available!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander .