Microsoft Visual Studio 11 beta and Windows 8 Consumer Previews were made available on Feb 29th 2012. They will be valid through to June 2012.
The Xpert360 development team took the beta for a spin with the latest versions of the Xpert360 Lightning Series product builds: WCF Ria Service data source extensions for LightSwitch and .NET 4 that connect to salesforce and Dynamics CRM Online instances.
VS11 Beta Premium Applying: LightSwitch Beta Core
After the VS11 install a quick rebuild of the data extensions VSIX in VS2010 pulled in the latest software versioning as shown below:
Clip for LightSwitch Data Extension vsixmanifest
The new VSIX files now prompt for the version of Visual Studio if not already installed and within ten minutes of the VS11 install we are building our first Visual Studio LightSwitch 11 application to interact with our CRM test systems.
LightSwitch project templates in VS11 Beta
Then we create new data connections with the Xpert360 Lightning Data Extensions.
LightSwitch designer - Choose a WCF Ria Service!
… and we move on and choose some of the CRM entities exposed by the service.
LightSwitch designer - Select Data Source Objects from Dynamics CRM Online
The chosen entities appear against the data source in the LightSwitch designer and can be explored and manipulated as usual. Notice the automatically available entity relationships between the salesforce entities.
LightSwitch designer - SalesForce Opportunity Entity with chosen subset fo relationships
A few more clicks to build a list detail screen…
LightSwitch designer - Xpert360 Lightning Data Extensions
Ten minutes later we have our first CRM data from salesforce and Dynamics CRM Online.
LightSwitch - SalesForce Opportunities List Details at your disposal
Looking around in the VS11 IDE the default theme has faded to grey, perhaps its vying for an Oscar with “The Artist”. Here are the two LightSwitch project views available in solution explorer:
LightSwitch designer - Logical and File views
If you are embarking on custom UI controls with Silverlight 5 then here are the available project templates in VS11:
VS11 Beta Silverlight project templates
We are also eagerly awaiting the VS11 LightSwitch Extensibility Toolkit which has been indicated to be ready in a few weeks by Beth Massi:
The Xpert360 Lightning Series data extensions will unleash the true power of LightSwitch onto your salesforce CRM and Dynamics CRM Online data very soon. They are currently undergoing private beta testing which will now be extended to include the VS11 Beta as this platfrom has a go-live license.
If you somehow missed all the anouncements here are the links:
- Announcing LightSwitch in Visual Studio 11 Beta! – LS Team blog
- Welcome to the Beta of VS11 and .NET 4.5 – Jason Zanders Weblog
- Visual Studio 11 Beta downloads – Microsoft Visual Studio
Any feedback or enquiries welcome at mailto:info@xpert360.com
Xpert360 Ltd Development Blog 