LightSwitch is the fastest way to build database applications for the desktop and the cloud. In this episode, Robert shows you how to make developing with LightSwitch even faster with the LightSwitch Starter Kits. These Starter Kits cover common business needs like expense reporting and issue tracking. All you need to do is download and install one of the kits and then create a new LightSwitch project based on it. LightSwitch creates data tables and screens and writes some basic code for you. You can press F5 and run or customize the application to meet your needs. And because you built it with LightSwitch, the application is well architected and scalable.

                                             

Mei Liang is our guest this week. She is here to talk about the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, a code sample library provided by the Microsoft Community team. The Microsoft Community team monitors the MSDN forums, as well as other developer hangouts, and then creates code samples that address the issues developers run into. In this video, Mei shows us how to search for samples using the All-In-One Code Framework Sample Browser, which runs as a Visual Studio extension. She then shows us that the Sample Browser runs stand-alone! Good news for our viewers who are using Visual Studio Express.

We are excited to announce that Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 Release Candidate (EF 4.1 RC) is now available. This is a fully supported, go-live release. In approximately one month we plan to release the final Release to Web (RTW). We are not planning any changes to the API surface or behavior between RC and RTW, the release is purely to allow any new bugs found in the RC build to be evaluated and potentially fixed.

 

What’s in EF 4.1 RC?

ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 RC introduces two new features:

• The DbContext API is a simplified abstraction over ObjectContext and a number of other types that were included in previous releases of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The DbContext API surface is optimized for common tasks and coding patterns. DbContext can be used with Database First, Model First and Code First development.
• Code First is a new development pattern for the ADO.NET Entity Framework and provides an alternative to the existing Database First and Model First patterns. Code First is focused around defining your model using C#/VB.NET classes, these classes can then be mapped to an existing database or be used to generate a database schema. Additional configuration can be supplied using Data Annotations or via a fluent API.

As of this week, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is now available for download!  The service pack was released to MSDN subscribers on March 8 and became generally available on March 10.  SP1 includes fixes that improve reliability and address the most commonly-reported customer bugs.  It also adds some of the most requested feature improvements, including a new local help viewer, IntelliTrace support in more scenarios, and built-in Silverlight 4 tooling.

For more information, check out the following blog posts and links:

• Download link for Visual Studio 2010 SP1
• Announcement of SP1 on Jason Zander’s Blog
• List of changes in SP1 for Visual Studio
• List of changes in SP1 for Team Foundation Server (TFS)
• Information about SP1 compatibility
• Official VS 2010 SP1 Readme

Enjoy!