jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Sat Sep 11 09:45:14 CDT 2010
In reading through the blogs and responses there is a whole lot of "this is a toy" and "just like access" and "creates useless things that can't be expanded". I found it highly amusing myself. Tons of "serious developers" complaining that Access was used to develop apps that got 5 years down the road and couldn't be expanded. Never mentioning that those very Access apps were developed because the IT department never got around to handling the needs of their clients! I was called in to Disability Insurance Specialists in March 2002 to help them start their business. At that time they had about 20 people (they have since expanded to about 60). Their budget was a couple of K a month. They needed a call center application but they had nothing but a single huge denormalized table which had to be normalized, and then needed forms written to allow them to do anything. What "serious developer" working for a "serious development company" is going to bootstrap such a company? They got quotes, and the quotes always started with "10K to come in and talk to you and write a spec". Non Starters. So I went in and wrote them a call center, month by month, piece by piece, as they could afford each piece. And yet the same "serious developers" who work for "serious development companies" complain bitterly about how Access is used to do the very things that they price themselves right out of the market for. I just about choked on my Cocoa when I read one "serious developer" comment about taking over LightSwitch projects - "I'll tell them the same thing I tell the access developers - write a spec for your program and give it to IT (and wait for 5 years while we get around to it)". Can you say ARROGANT? I think LightSwitch is just such a tool. I am looking at it now as a replacement for Access, exactly for this exact same kind of development. At least at the end of the day it is built on .Net and SQL Server instead of Access. If it gives me the ability to knock out small projects in hours or days instead of weeks and months, then I am there! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. And may every IT department treat their clients as arrogantly, so that I can earn a fine living giving them what they need, in a time frame that matches their requirements, on a budget they can afford. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com On 9/10/2010 4:59 PM, Gustav Brock wrote: > Hi Shamil > > Well, I'm working my way through the tutorial that's for download as well and I'm impressed. > > Please note the target applications: small business apps with no other purpose than "getting work done". Such apps often have no special requirements for design or features, yet they must be reliable and consistent to use - yet fast to develop or you simply don't have the budget. > > Most data is collected in a local lsml (LightSwitchML) file but it connects via the EF to nearly everything just like that. It is so flexible, and validation, error messages and so on is ready at hand with zero or extremely little code. Importantly, the EF let's you "remodel" any data source making it very easy to adapt and connect/relate different data sources - again with zero code; this feature alone is worth studying. > > The default design of screens (forms) is very neat (using Silverlight) and so far from what you can handcraft otherwise (even using hours) with VS. > > Of course, like Access, this is a dangerous tool for those not knowing relational databases - but for you and I and our fellow list members who know about databases, this could be a very strong tool - mastering this could make you very competitive for small projects. > > Just today we were assigned a new straight-forward project (controlling projects/employees/contracts/salaries for a small TV production company) where we will put it to use to check it out. > > /gustav