I was planning to play around with Visual Studio Lightswitch for a while. Finally, I could spare some time. For me the best way of learning is by doing so before I started playing I had to imagine a project first.

To find an appropriate project of course we have analyse what Lightswitch is and is it good for: In a nutshell, Visual Studio Lightswitch is a fast and easy way to develop data-driven Line-of-Business (LOB) applications. As a developer, I am generally not very fond of such tools because they impose many limitations whereas while writing code we have unlimited freedom. But I also hate wasting time with boiler-plate code. Creating add/edit/search screens for some entities is such a trivial and boring task. Such forms should always be  generated by a tool to sustain consistency. Otherwise, especially in large applications and organizations. By the way, this reminded me the one of the worst forms I have ever seen in a Microsoft application. It’s the reporting form in Team Foundation Server 2010 as shown below. Even the tabs in the same form are inconsistent. But, I digress! Let’s move on.

For a long time I was looking for an nice open-source software to manage my movie collection. I tried a few but couldn’t exactly find what I wanted. So while trying to find a project idea I decided to create a simple movie manager application. It’s mainly data entry and search so it sounded an ideal project type for Lightswitch.

The result was amazing! Not that I created a complex and fully-functioning application but within minutes I had a simple database and two forms to enter movie and director information and a movie search form.

The screens are customizable but the even the default templates create very satisfying results. They cover all the basic needs for data entry, validation and search. So having a such tool in my arsenal and always preferring to develop my own software instead of using someone else’s I decided to develop my movie and TV show management program with Lightswitch. Thinking this is only version 1.0, I think there’s great potential in it for there are so many applications to develop but not enough time.