Why Microsoft Lightswitch is not MS Access.

There is a great deal of concern among developers that Visual Studio Lightswitch will dumb down programming. Donald Belcham, for example, suggests that Lightswitch is going to be like MS Access with all it’s bad practices.

To the professional developers that read this blog (most of you I’m guessing), prepare to move your hatred and loathing from MS Access to LightSwitch.

I believe this view misrepresents what Lightswitch is.

Lightswitch is a declarative framework to perform databinding straight-through from presentation layer to storage layer, with proper extension points to support validation at the business object layer. It is a distillation of existing framework practices. For instance, based on a Lightswitch spec, there is no reason why one couldn’t build it on top of NHibernate.

In fact, Lightswitch is so declarative that the same spec be deployed against an Azure database, as well as one on SQL Server. It is sufficiently declarative that it can run on the desktop browser as well as fit in the form factor of a smartphone. This is a million miles away from dragging and dropping components, and wiring up event handlers.

This is why I, personally am excited about Lightswitch.

Lightswitch is not a library. It is an application framework for data-oriented applications.