What does your application (or extension) do? What business problem does it solve?
The application in question represents a financial
bookkeeping app, in particular, a general ledger module. It currently
allows for accounts balance checking and tracking for one, or as effectively,
for either many different legal business entities by a certified accountant – or
even a layperson – being easily usable.
How many screens and entities does this application have?
The application has 40 screens and 27
entities, most containing multiple queries, with few screens being reused.
Additionally answer as many questions below
to improve your chances to win.
Did LightSwitch save your business money? How?
LightSwitch hasn’t saved us money in
particular, per se. However, its license is worth every penny as it’s an
extremely consistent development framework. It’s bringing a number of paradigms
which are quite well implemented just right OOB.
Would this application still be built if you didn’t have LightSwitch? If yes, with what?
Had not LightSwitch been available the
application probably wouldn’t have been built, but had it been built in another
technology, those probably would have been WinForms. This is since vanilla WPF
and Silverlight though both now extremely data-bind friendly, are rather hard
to implement just right, and using LS makes you leapfrog into a MVVM application
architecture extremely fast (not even being aware one is using it).
How many users does this application support?
The application is currently single user
per (desktop) install, however it’s about to be adapted to a multi-tenant
regime for Windows Azure deployment. As most of its logic was placed
server-side into the Application Data Service, it will probably be able to
handle as many as a dozen simultaneous users on an extra small instance Windows
Azure deployment (if not more). Once it’s initially tested on a Windows Azure
database further tests will be made to determine if and how the logic could be
made client-side, but by not spreading it too much through various screens
(hopefully by using workflow foundation also) ...
How long did this application take to actually build using LightSwitch?
Approximately, a month or so.
Does this application use any LightSwitch extensions? If so, which ones? Did you write any of these extensions yourself? If so, is it available to the public? Where?
It currently uses one
custom written extension adapting a Silverlight Combo Box control for
LightSwitch general use, thus being easily reusable in other LightSwitch apps
which are using the same naming conventions for Combo Box Selected Item Value/Text
assignment. If requested, the extension can be easily made public, since it’s a
relatively good example of how to customize Silverlight controls for
LightSwitch, a topic wonderfully covered by Mr. Washington and his LightSwitch
Help Website (so there might be no need).
Also, the application uses DevExpress
Lightswitch XtraReports, for its dozen or so reports.
For future use, once additional modules are
built, there will be extensions added based on Native Extensions for
Silverlight. Those should allow for serial communication to an electronic cash
register, eliminating the need for some manual data entry.
How did LightSwitch make your developer life better? Was it faster to build compared to other options you considered?
LightSwich was definitely easier in terms
of amount of code that was written by hand, bringing in a lot of features
pre-built. Through extensions in modal add/edit dialogs there was a lot gained
in terms of extending the already given consistency in the application’s UI/UX.
And it was definitely faster than having to use WinForms and implement some of
the LightSwitch OOB already provided features.
