Luminous Commands For LightSwitch

1. What does your application (or extension) do? What business problem does it solve?

My extension (Luminous Commands) provides two pieces of functionality that were missing from LS RTM but wanted by many users.

• The GroupLayout control allows developers to put controls in a group, like a ColumnsLayout, or a RowsLayout, but gives the ability to add a themed border, & a themed background, a group title, plus various other settings to allow some very interesting layouts (see images in the Visual Studio Gallery submission.
• The TextBlock control allows people to add static text to a screen, without having to add multiple screen properties (the current version requires one screen property, but can be shared with multiple TextBlocks) without writing any code (the current way to do this requires a screen property per piece of text & code in the screens Created method).
• It saves people money because it's free.

2. How many screens and entities does this application have?

The extension has two controls.

3. Did LightSwitch save your business money? How?

This extension saves myself, & other developers, a lot of hassle (& therefore time & money), trying to get screens to look better than they do with just the built-in LS controls, by allowing them to visually group controls, & add static text without having to write any code do either.

4. Would this application still be built if you didn’t have LightSwitch? If yes, with what?

If this extension didn't exist, it would take a lot of time to try to achieve the same results (if at all in the case of the GroupLayout). It would have to be done with code.

5. How many users does this application support?

The extension can support any number of screens, in any number of applications, for any number of users.

6. How long did this application take to actually build using LightSwitch?

The use of the "Extensibility Toolkit" made creating the extension a LOT easier than trying to do it without it, or using the methods in the "Extensibility Cookbook". I also ended up modifying the templates, which made producing extension items even faster. I didn't keep track of how long it actually took to create the extension though.

7. 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?

Yes, I wrote this extension myself, & then released it to the community for free. It can be downloaded here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/58e0f1f4-d2d8-41f9-a4f9-dae70d5826e9