Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 11. Deploying Your LightSwitch Application

Congratulations, you’ve built a great application! The application has a normalized database, a business layer with web services, and a highly interactive user interface. It looks like this application is going to be a great success except for one little detail. It only runs on your machine and the only way you can launch it is through Visual Studio. We’ve talked about wanting to use the data from our application to build a business intelligence solution. In order to do that, you’ll need to get this running on a server where your users can access it; you will also need to get the data on a server where you can report from it. In this chapter, we’ll talk about deployment of a LightSwitch application with on-premise IIS and SQL Servers. LightSwitch also supports deployment to Windows Azure using the same application we just built, but in order to take advantage of the SQL Server 2012 business intelligence features, you’re going to deploy to your own servers.

The Application Designer

Before we deploy the application to a server, let’s start with a quick review of the application properties for our LightSwitch application. To get to the Application Designer, double-click on Properties in the Solution Explorer window on the right. This will launch the Application Designer. In particular, we’re going to be interested in the bottom tab labeled Application Type.

When we deploy our application, we’re going to expose it within SharePoint so ...