Second Look at LightSwitch in VS2013 Preview

More Impressions OF LightSwitch

And Visual Studio 2013 Preview

This week has been very busy for most people involved with Microsoft technologies as the BUILD 2013 ( #BLDWIN ) and TechEd 2013 draw to a close.

Our teams have been busy evaluating and testing. As most activities have been successful and gratifyingly trouble free, some more feedback is available for LightSwitch V4 Preview and Visual Studio Extensions.

Xpert360 Lightning Series in VS2013 Preview

Above is a screen of a preview of the AIDE power tool running in Visual Studio 2013, an upgraded LightSwitch Rich-Client (V2 > V4) application, our LightSwitch Theme Generator tool, and four of our LightSwitch extensions migrated to VS2013.

For extensions the targeted version range in the manifest needed to include the internal version number ‘12.0’. So now the range is ‘[11.0, 12.0]’ in the manifests. The Dynamics adapter is slightly different as it is built in VS2010 so targets ‘VSLS’ and ‘10.0’ as well.

The LightSwitch theme packs worked straight away but the other extensions required some additional changes and testing.

Xpert360 Office Theme Pack Install for LightSwitch

The ThemeGen application is what we use internally to edit and validate LightSwitch themes for Rich-Client/Desktop/Silverlight clients. When dealing with the 600+ colors in the Cosmopolitan styles it is a big time saver.

In an unusual take on ‘eat-your-own-dog-food’ style, the upgraded ThemeGen is sporting themes from our VS2013 preview of Office Theme Pack, that was created using its self. For anyone new to LightSwitch, yes these are real screens of a real LightSwitch app delivered in true RAD-fashion.

VS2013 LightSwitch app in VS2012 Color Theme

VS2013 LightSwitch app in Dark Blue theme

The theme pack contains a total of eight themes.

Office Themes in VS2013 LightSwitch

Our remaining themes, theme packs, extensions and samples are in the queue to be upgraded and should be available over the coming weeks.

Conclusions

We have successfully upgraded some LightSwitch applications (Rich-Client and Mobile-Client) from V2 to V4 and V3 to V4.

Apart from the issues already noted by bloggers and the LightSwitch team, the process has been relatively smooth to-date.

We are running VS2012 Update 3 and VS2013 Preview side-by-side on Windows 7 and Windows 8 OS platforms.

We are in the process of upgrading Visual Studio extensions to VS2013 Preview and this process is also going well.

Good job all around!