On his blog yesterday, Soma (Sr. VP of Developer Division at Microsoft), announced that Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 will be coming soon. I can tell you, we are really excited about LightSwitch, and apparently you are too (you’ve downloaded over 100,000 copies of Beta 1).
One question that comes up a lot is, what can LightSwitch do versus what can Visual Studio Professional do? What’s the difference? Well, the difference is pretty clear.
Visual Studio LightSwitch is a specialist tool for building line-of-business applications for the desktop and cloud, while Visual Studio Professional is a generalist tool for building anything you can imaging for Microsoft platforms.
Take a look at this feature matrix and you’ll see what I mean (we’ll get a formal version of this up on http://www.microsoft.com/lightswitch soon).
|
Visual Studio LightSwitch |
Visual Studio Professional |
|
| LightSwitch Runtime |
Yes |
Yes1 |
| Visual Studio Project System |
Yes |
Yes |
| IntelliSense |
Yes |
Yes |
| Team Explorer (Team Foundation Server integration) |
–2, 3 |
Yes3 |
|
LIGHTSWITCH APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT |
||
| Predefined Screen Templates |
Yes |
Yes1 |
| Application Skinning and Theming |
Yes |
Yes1 |
| Data Entity Designer |
Yes |
Yes1 |
| Business-oriented Data Types (e.g. EmailAddress, PhoneNumber, etc.) |
Yes |
Yes1 |
| Automatic Data Input Validation |
Yes |
Yes1 |
| Windows Azure Deployment |
Yes |
Yes1 |
| SQL Azure Support |
Yes |
Yes |
| LANGUAGES, EDITORS & COMPILERS | ||
| Visual Basic |
Yes |
Yes |
| Visual C# |
Yes |
Yes |
| Visual C++ |
– |
Yes |
| Visual F# |
– |
Yes |
| HTML/JavaScript |
– |
Yes |
| Silverlight/XAML Editor |
– |
Yes |
| PROJECT TYPES | ||
| LightSwitch Application |
Yes |
Yes1 |
| ASP.NET |
– |
Yes |
| ASP.NET AJAX |
– |
Yes |
| ASP.NET MVC |
– |
Yes |
| Console Application |
– |
Yes |
| Database Projects |
– |
Yes |
| Office Applications & Add-ins |
– |
Yes |
| Setup Projects |
– |
Yes |
| SharePoint Applications & WebParts |
– |
Yes |
| Test Projects |
– |
Yes |
| Visual Studio Add-ins |
– |
Yes |
| Windows Forms |
– |
Yes |
| Windows Phone |
– |
Yes |
| WCF |
– |
Yes |
| WPF |
– |
Yes |
| XNA Games |
– |
Yes |
1 Only available for LightSwitch applications. Requires Visual Studio LightSwitch and Visual Studio Professional to both be installed.
2 Team Explorer will integrate with LightSwitch but must be installed separately.
3 Requires a Team Foundation Server Client Access License (CAL).
I hope that helps!
D7
Doug Seven 
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