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On his blog yesterday, Soma (Sr. VP of Developer Division at Microsoft), announced that Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 will be coming soon. I can tell you, we are really excited about LightSwitch, and apparently you are too (you’ve downloaded over 100,000 copies of Beta 1).
One question that comes up a lot is, what can LightSwitch do versus what can Visual Studio Professional do? What’s the difference? Well, the difference is pretty clear.
Visual Studio LightSwitch is a specialist tool for building line-of-business applications for the desktop and cloud, while Visual Studio Professional is a generalist tool for building anything you can imagine for Microsoft's platforms.
Take a look at this feature matrix and you’ll see what I mean (we’ll get a formal version of this up on www.microsoft.com/lightswitch soon).
|
Visual Studio LightSwitch |
Visual Studio Professional |
|
|
LightSwitch Runtime |
Yes |
Yes1 |
|
Visual Studio Project System |
Yes |
Yes |
|
IntelliSense |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Team Explorer (Team Foundation Server integration) |
-2, 3 |
Yes3 |
|
LIGHTSWITCH APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT |
||
|
Predefined Screen Templates |
Yes |
Yes1 |
|
Application Skinning and Theming |
Yes |
Yes1 |
|
Data Entity Designer |
Yes |
Yes1 |
|
Business-oriented Data Types (e.g. EmailAddress, PhoneNumber, etc.) |
Yes |
Yes1 |
|
Automatic Data Input Validation |
Yes |
Yes1 |
|
Windows Azure Deployment |
Yes |
Yes1 |
|
SQL Azure Support |
Yes |
Yes |
|
LANGUAGES, EDITORS & COMPILERS |
||
|
Visual Basic |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Visual C# |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Visual C++ |
- |
Yes |
|
Visual F# |
- |
Yes |
|
HTML/JavaScript |
- |
Yes |
|
Silverlight/XAML Editor |
- |
Yes |
|
PROJECT TYPES |
||
|
LightSwitch Application |
Yes |
Yes1 |
|
ASP.NET |
- |
Yes |
|
ASP.NET AJAX |
- |
Yes |
|
ASP.NET MVC |
- |
Yes |
|
Console Application |
- |
Yes |
|
Database Projects |
- |
Yes |
|
Office Applications & Add-ins |
- |
Yes |
|
Setup Projects |
- |
Yes |
|
SharePoint Applications & WebParts |
- |
Yes |
|
Test Projects |
- |
Yes |
|
Visual Studio Add-ins |
- |
Yes |
|
Windows Forms |
- |
Yes |
|
Windows Phone |
- |
Yes |
|
WCF |
- |
Yes |
|
WPF |
- |
Yes |
|
XNA Games |
- |
Yes |
1 Only available for LightSwitch applications. Requires Visual Studio LightSwitch and Visual Studio Professional to both be installed.
2 Team Explorer will integrate with LightSwitch but must be installed separately.
3 Requires a Team Foundation Server Client Access License (CAL).
I hope that helps!
D7