How is Visual Studio Lightswitch different from regular Visual Studio? In what sort of situations would you use this IDE over regular Visual Studio?
I'm trying to decide if this is something that would be worthwhile for me to take the time learning since I am currently doing WPF/Silverlight development.
Best Answer
LightSwitch is for one kind of app and one kind only - a forms-over-data app. One where the ui is pretty much driven by the schema of the data, and you want to offer essentially CRUD to that data. It lets people without a lot of coding experience wire up forms to serve that purpose. Its big advantage is that when the app starts to grow organically and get a little out of hand, an actual experienced developer can take over in Visual Studio and add more things as required. This in contrast to say an Access app that can go so far and then no further.
It also has some bells and whistles like being a client (Desktop) app or a web app as a configurable choice, supporting a nice range of extensions and custom controls, and being all Silverlighty and beautiful. If you aren't writing forms-over-data, you don't care. If you are, look into it.