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.

                                           

Robert is flying solo this week as he shows you the Power Commands for Visual Studio 2010 extension. He notes that there have been almost 250,000 downloads of this, and after seeing it you will understand why. This extension adds a number of commands to Visual Studio to help you work with projects, files, references, and code.

                                             

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!!