Chapter 6. Screens: The LightSwitch User Interface

If you’ve heard of LightSwitch before today, you may know that LightSwitch apps support both rich client out-of-browser and in-browser web applications. It does this because the primary user interface of LightSwitch applications is rendered in Microsoft Silverlight. Silverlight is an application framework for writing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). It takes a subset of the .NET framework and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and makes it available across Windows and Macintosh platforms.

While Silverlight is a mature application framework, LightSwitch is designed to support multiple clients for each application project. In the Visual Studio 2012 release of LightSwitch, Microsoft has the Silverlight clients available. In the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 release a new HTML5 Client is added, designed for mobile and tablet touch scenarios. The model-driven architecture of LightSwitch allows additional clients to be added in the future allowing you to extend your application’s reach, creating user experiences that take advantage of the platform on which they run.

The Silverlight-based user interface is the most sophisticated today, designed to allow users to have multiple windows open at a time and switch between them with tabs. We’ll focus on the Silverlight desktop experience, which may be more comfortable for today’s .NET developers, knowing that we are insulated from changing technology standards by LightSwitch model- and service-driven ...

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