“Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool aimed at easily building data-driven applications, such as an inventory system or a basic customer relationship management system.”

Typically, when making difficult things easy, the price is solving a set of very difficult technical problems. In this case, the LightSwitch engineering team needed to remove the necessity for non-programmer domain experts to think about application tiers (e.g., client, web server, and database) when constructing data-bound applications for use in their daily business lives. LightSwitch is designed for non-programmers, but it also offers the ability to customize and extend it, which will most likely be done by experienced developers (see Beth Massi’s Beyond the Basics interview to learn about some of the more advanced capabilities).

This conversation isn’t really about how to use LightSwitch (or how to extend it to meet your specific needs)—that’s already been covered. Rather, in this video we meet the architects behind LightSwitch, Steve Anonsen and John Rivard, focusing on how LightSwitch is designed and what problems it actually solves as a consequence of the design. Most of the time is spent at the whiteboard, discussing architecture and solutions to some hard technical problems. This is Going Deep, so we will open LightSwitch’s hood and dive into the rabbit hole.

Enjoy!

For more information on LightSwitch, please see: