DotNetShoutout

Hello Silverlight Community, I am the product manager for Microsoft® Visual Studio® LightSwitch™. Today, we are making Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 publicly available for download. If you are new to Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 here are some resources to get you started:

What’s new in Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2
Visual Studio LightSwitch Tutorial on creating applications (Jason Zander’s Post)

Visual Studio LightSwitch Extension Overview

For this blog post I am going to focus on extensions for Visual Studio LightSwitch applications and show you an example of how they are used. Extensions provide additional functionality that is not standard in the product. For example, adding a unique screen template that did not ship in the box. Silverlight is one of the technologies used in developing extensions. There are 6 extension points.

Business Type – is a refinement of a data type that provides formatting, validation and visualization.
Control - is the building block of extensions and is what users interact with.
Custom Data Source – provides connectivity to other data sources via a WCF RIA Service.
Screen Template – is a stencil for the layout of how controls are to be displayed at run-time.
Shell – provides the common look and feel of an application.
Theme – is the color and font palette.