Summary
Visual Studio LightSwitch wants developers to be able to develop business applications quickly and easily. This kind of application is all about data, so in this chapter, you learned how LightSwitch organizes data in tables, entities, and entity collections. Then you learned how entities can handle specific data types, such as strings, integer numbers, dates, email addresses, and so on. This chapter also explained the main steps you follow in the development process:
- Create a new Visual Basic or Visual C# project.
- Design data sources via the Table Designer, by providing properties and setting data types for each property.
- Add screens from a set of common templates, understanding how LightSwitch automatically binds data to the user interface.
- Test the application by running it as a 2-tier or 3-tier client, both on the desktop and in the web browser.
- Validate data and customize the default validation behaviors.
An overview of the most common controls and of the application architecture was provided to give you the basics about topics that are discussed in more detail later in this book. This chapter provided the basics of the LightSwitch development for a single-table database and a user interface that has no relationships with other screens. But real-world applications are more complex, both on the data side and on the user interface side. This is what we cover in the next chapter.