Foreword

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Alessandro for many years, ever since I started my career at Microsoft. The first time I ever heard from Alessandro was through my blog contact form, and we have collaborated on community content and activities ever since. Not long after he published his first article on MSDN, Alessandro was awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for his exceptional community leadership and technical expertise. It’s always fun working with Alessandro and to see his excitement and passion for the developer community, something we both share.

When Visual Studio LightSwitch was announced and the first beta released back in August 2010, Alessandro was right onboard creating a LightSwitch Tips & Tricks community modeled after his successful Visual Basic Tips & Tricks forums and blogs. His passion for Visual Studio LightSwitch is as strong as his passion for Visual Basic. Alessandro aims to make programming easy, fun, and productive, just as we strive to do on the Visual Studio LightSwitch team. It was an honor for us to have Alessandro as one of our community rock stars and LightSwitch advocates so early on.

At that time, Alessandro started on a journey to write this book and asked me to be the technical reviewer. I was very excited to do it, especially because I had just become the Community Manager for the LightSwitch team and was diving head first into the product myself. I was particularly excited to join the LightSwitch team because I have a long history of building business applications and information systems, particularly for the healthcare industry. I was immediately amazed at what I could build in such a short amount of time with Visual Studio LightSwitch. I was also impressed with all the details it handles automatically for you, such as CRUD plumbing, concurrency handling, dirty checking, automatic screen navigation and lookup lists, user permissions, and so much more.

It doesn’t take long to realize how extremely productive you can be with Visual Studio LightSwitch, regardless of your programming skills. Because of this, and the fact that we made many enhancements from beta 1 to beta 2 to RTM, it was a challenge at times to get the book organized in the optimal way. I think we achieved our goal. The book begins with the beginner in mind and then moves deeper into professional developer topics. I see LightSwitch developers progressing this way, as well, starting off with minimal coding, releasing business productivity applications in no time, and becoming the company hero. Then they may move on to more-advanced customizations as the requirements start to hit the limits of what you can do out of the box. LightSwitch has an extensive extensibility model, and when you need it, you can do just about anything. The end of the book shows you how to take advantage of this.

Alessandro explains Visual Studio LightSwitch in a way that is easy to understand, and his passion comes through in every paragraph. I know you will find this book filled with prescriptive guidance and tips and tricks that you can apply to the LightSwitch business applications you are building today. I really enjoyed reviewing this book, and I’m sure you will enjoy reading it.

—Beth Massi