Today at VSLive Microsoft announced LightSwitch.  As MVPs we’ve been seeing demos of this technology for something like forever,  and although it’ll now be open to a broader debate, many us think this is a good product direction.

For starters we need to address who LightSwitch is targeting.  Odds are if you are reading my blog – you are familiar with things like .NET or T-SQL or other developer technologies.  Guess what – you aren’t the target of LightSwitch.  Yes accommodations have been made in the design to keep us nerds from revolting against this product – but its important to remember we aren’t the target.

If you know what Silverlight is, or any of the technology I’m about to discuss that implements LightSwitch solutions, and in most cases even the fact that you care – means you are on the fringe of the target audience for this product.

LightSwitch – the marketing hooks are blatant but focus on the simplicity of turning on a light.  Tell me – what’s all the technology used in allowing us to turn on a light is?  I mean down to the power generation (are you currently using wind, oil or coal generated power) [analogy: database servers], connectivity to your house through the power supply system (where is your substation?)[analogy: communication protocols] and wiring from the fuse box (which breaker is that light currently on) [analogy: desktop/browser].  You know how and routinely change your light bulb, and probably have reasonable familiarity with your local fuse box, but getting the light on doesn’t require much more from you than hitting the switch.

That’s the goal of LightSwitch.  Take someone who conceptually knows there is a database – probably even knows how to connect to it.  Knows that there is communication to that database, but doesn’t care if its (or in most cases understand the difference between) Entity Framework, ADO.NET, LINQ, WCF, Synchronous vs Asynchronous or any of a dozen other elements on how the data travels.  They just want to create a form that accesses and updates the data and have it work.

Why target this group – because the market is huge.  This isn’t a hidden market nor is it an attempt to reach people who are using a competitor’s tools.  LightSwitch targets tech savvy business people with the tools necessary to quickly implement a solution that their IT department told them would take “2-6 months if we can get to it.” 

Also for all you’ve heard about the integration with Visual Studio 2010 let me clarify because I’m hearing some confusion -

LightSwitch is a standalone product and not tied to Visual Studio 2010.

(It’s ‘LightSwitch’ not ‘LightSpeed’)

The good news, on the back end it’s built on C# (or VB) .NET and Silverlight and that a LightSwitch project can be opened and modified by someone familiar with Visual Studio 2010.  If this was a true ‘Visual Studio product we would refer to how it would speed development – that’s not the focus.

Enabling more people to create solutions, and having those solutions built on some of the most effective Microsoft technologies is the focus.  As part of this, core features like data binding, applying a style, simple validation etc. are built to not require custom code or even much knowledge as to how they work.

That’s the idea – a quick and easy way for Dave in Finance to add a new table allowing him to add, edit and delete his contacts for accounts payable or some similar basic application that isn’t high enough on the IT priority list to get implemented.

Fact is most IT people fear this because it empowers Dave in Finance to suddenly create what in 6-12 months will be a key application in the company’s toolbox.  That’s why it was important that Microsoft integrate LightSwitch with Visual Studio 2010.  Because in 6 months when the CxO finds out that the reason the company is saving x% in costs in Finance is this little application Dave created and that 2 or 3 ‘minor’ enhancements would just save more – Dave’s project is suddenly going to get priority.

In the past when this happened everyone groaned because it often meant a complete rewrite from scratch.  With LightSwitch that may still happen sometimes, but the fact that LightSwitch gives us a project built with the same tools and technologies that IT is building with means that there is a much greater likelihood that instead IT can just add capabilities to the original application.

LightSwitch generates an application that uses Silverlight 4 and by default starts in out-of-browser mode.  To the non-techie – it’s just another application on their desktop.  However, with the flip of a setting (in the beta it’ll be interesting to see if it can remain this simple as more people play with this) the application can become web based and talk to distributed data sources.

Speaking of distributed data, it looks like a lot of effort has gone into not only supporting traditional SQL Server data sources, but also support for XML and in particular SharePoint list data.  It is this last category which in some ways makes LightSwitch so powerful.  The wildfire like proliferation of SharePoint data embedded in SharePoint lists being available with no code is a powerful feature.

Overall keeping in mind that this is still a Beta and we don’t know how long it will take Microsoft to finish polishing up the rough edges, this is just as promising a tool as it was 18+ months ago when we first started hearing about it.  If Microsoft manages to properly target the business user with features like built in Export to Excel (or Word) this has the potential to have SharePoint like adoption and change the developer landscape.