Developing Lightswitch apps using Visual Studio

I wrote a book on Microsoft Lightswitch (read here about Lightswitch ) when it was still going through the BETA phase. After finishing the book, I pretty much forgot about it till recently one of readers asked a question with some screen shots. I did not remember seeing those screens when it was in Beta. I found out many other versions were  released  between then and now.

Visual Studio Community 2013 was announced in 2014 which could be sued to build all sorts of things targeting a whole lot of people from students, novices to developers. However Lightswitch projects did not make an appearance in the projects.

In order to work with Visual Studio Lightswitch you also need to install Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2103 November update according to MSDNBlog/Lightswitch.
You an get this here:
http://aka.ms/OfficeDevToolsForVS2013

With the above installed, you can now create a Lightswitch project in Visual Studio 2013 Community.

Here is Help | About Microsoft Visual Studio screen showing some of the finer details about the IDE.

00
Here is the New Project... window showing Lightswitch project in installed templates.

01
Here are the default folders and files created in the Solution Explorer.

02
Hey! You start with data

Enjoy!

You get all this for free in Visual Studio Community 2013

This post is about installing Visual Studio Community 2013 on a Windows 8.1 Professional on a laptop computer (Toshiba Satellite S70 series).

I wanted to see what I will get installing Visual Studio Community 2013. I downloaded vs_community.exe from this site here:
http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-community-vs
Installation starts with double clicking the downloaded program from the downloaded location.

 

You require something like 8 GB for the program. Check and accept license terms to go forward.

 

 

I selected everything as shown here .

I started late in the night and I just let it extract files from internet and install. I just clicked Install
In the morning I noticed that installation was successful and I could launch the application. You will have to have a Windows Live account or other authentication.

Clicking on Start Visual Studio brings up the start screen. I chose the blue theme.

 

This is the version information:

 

Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2013
Version 12.0.31101.00 Update 4
Microsoft .NET Framework
Version 4.5.51641

 

Installing you will be getting all these for free:

 

Installed Version: Professional

Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2013   06177-004-0444002-02503
Microsoft Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2013

 

Visual Basic 2013   06177-004-0444002-02503
Microsoft Visual Basic 2013

 

Visual C# 2013   06177-004-0444002-02503
Microsoft Visual C# 2013

 

Visual C++ 2013   06177-004-0444002-02503
Microsoft Visual C++ 2013

 

Visual F# 2013   06177-004-0444002-02503
Microsoft Visual F# 2013

 

Visual Studio 2013 Code Analysis Spell Checker   06177-004-0444002-02503

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2013 Code Analysis Spell Checker

 

Portions of International CorrectSpell™ spelling correction system © 1993 by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.

 

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992 Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.

 

Windows Phone SDK 8.0 - ENU   06177-004-0444002-02503
Windows Phone SDK 8.0 - ENU

 

Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio Package   1.0
Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio

 

ASP.NET and Web Tools   12.4.51016.0
Microsoft Web Developer Tools contains the following components:
Support for creating and opening ASP.NET web projects
Browser Link: A communication channel between Visual Studio and browsers
Editor extensions for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Page Inspector: Inspection tool for ASP.NET web projects
Scaffolding: A framework for building and running code generators
Server Explorer extensions for Microsoft Azure Websites
Web publishing: Extensions for publishing ASP.NET web projects to hosting providers, on-premises servers, or Microsoft Azure

 

ASP.NET Web Frameworks and Tools 2012.2   4.1.21001.0
For additional information, visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=309563

 

ASP.NET Web Frameworks and Tools 2013   5.2.21010.0
For additional information, visit http://www.asp.net/

 

Common Azure Tools   1.3
Provides common services for use by Azure Mobile Services and Microsoft Azure Tools.

 

Microsoft Azure Mobile Services Tools   1.3
Microsoft Azure Mobile Services Tools

 

NuGet Package Manager   2.8.50926.663
NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio. For more information about NuGet, visit http://docs.nuget.org/

 

PowerShell Tools   1.3
Provides file classification services using PowerShell

 

PreEmptive Analytics Visualizer   1.2
Microsoft Visual Studio extension to visualize aggregated summaries from the PreEmptive Analytics product.

 

SQL Server Data Tools   12.0.41012.0

Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools

 

Windows Phone 8.1 SDK Integration   1.0
This package integrates the tools for the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK into the menus and controls of Visual Studio.

 

 

 

 

 

Free Visual studio Community 2013 - hard to believe!

This is hard to believe, but true - Free Visual studio Community 2013.

Full featured VS IDE for free, unbelievable. Probably the express editions will be history. Yes, leadership changes can bring in bonanza some times. Also, one way to stem the Android.

In Microsoft's own words,
"The power of the cloud, state-of-the-art tools, and agile development services provide you with the most comprehensive free developer offering ever!"

You can code for multiple platforms from one IDE, Windows, Android, and iOS. Of course you get a bunch of tools and what not.

 

Here are some promo shots from Microsoft.

 

Powerful

 

Versatile

 

Extensible

Probably you have a lots of questions and these are all answered here and you can download now.
http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-community-vs

Download vs_community.exe at the above site.

Q&A of most interest from Microsoft site:

Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?
A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community:

• Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.

Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in organizations:

• An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
• For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1MM in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

Q: How does Visual Studio Community 2013 compare to other Visual Studio editions?
A: Visual Studio Community 2013 includes all the great functionality of Visual Studio Professional 2013, designed and optimized for individual developers, students, open source contributors, and small teams.

Q: How do I create a Visual Studio extension?
A: Millions of developers use Visual Studio extensions every day. Check out http://integrate.visualstudio.com for more information on building on any of the Visual Studio development tools and services.