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.

                          
                       

Have you ever run into a scenario where a long running task causes the Visual Studio UI thread to hang or become unresponsive? The PerfWatson extension logs these issues and automatically and anonymously reports back to Microsoft.

In this episode, we are joined by Cameron McColl, who explains why the PerfWatson extension was created and how you can install it. He also shows us some collected data and explains how it's used to drive performance improvements and make Visual Studio faster.

                       

In this episode, we explore code snippets, an underappreciated feature of Visual Studio.

Code snippets are existing pieces of code. All you have to do is type the snippets shortcut and Visual Studio writes the code for you. Watch as we first use a couple of snippets that ship with Visual Studio. Then, see how to use the Snippet Designer extension and create your own snippets. With this extension, you can highlight code, right-click, and Export as Snippet. Very cool!!

                        


In this episode of Visual Studio Toolbox, we talk about reuse, something we want as much of as we can get. We look at how you can create your own item template. We take an XAML splash screen and turn it into an item template that shows up when in the Add New Item dialog box. Then, we take a look at the VSIX Explorer and Export Template Wizard extensions and see how they make it easy for us to create a .vsix file—with that file, other developers can easily install (or uninstall) the splash screen item template.