SharePoint Apps with LightSwitch

Chapter 3. Simple Applications

With Visual Studio LightSwitch, it is extremely easy to build simple, single-function applications. This chapter will focus on these types of apps and how you can get them built and tested quickly. I’ll walk you through the steps of connecting to a SharePoint site, as that will be required for most of the other examples in the book.

The first thing I want to do is talk about what you can do with the product. Connecting to some type of data source is a primary requirement for most business applications, and Visual Studio LightSwitch makes this the first thing you see when starting a new app. Making the process simple is where LightSwitch really shines.

With version 1.0, you have three basic options for connecting to an external data source: a database (meaning any installed ADO.NET provider), a SharePoint site, or a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Rich Internet Application (RIA) Service. You also have the option of creating a new table from scratch. Visual Studio LightSwitch is a great tool for building simple database applications using SQL Server Express 2008 as the underlying engine.

We’ll spend the rest of the book talking about option two since this book is about building SharePoint applications with Visual Studio LightSwitch. With option three or WCF RIA services, you have the ability to connect to a wide variety of data sources, including any source supporting the OData protocol. This approach is definitely the most complex of the three, ...