Friday, December 9, 2011

Microsoft LightSwitch limitations

For those who are unfamiliar with Microsoft LightSwitch, the tool is an addition to Visual Studio 2010 for creating Line of Business applications with or without coding. It can be compared to VisualFoxPro to some degree and some people believe it may ultimately replace MS Access. The tool allows business users to create data centric applications. It's a wonderful tool and really good at quickly creating simple applications. However, like with any technology, it comes with some limitations.

Since we have recently been building LightSwitch applications in the real world,  here are some notes on limitations we encountered:

  • N to N relationships are not out of box (can be done in WCF RIA Services). 
  • One cannot call SPs other than via WCF RIA Services library 
  • Object_Inserted event is fired when transactions are still running (so you can’t fire up some stored procedure because the item is not yet committed to DB ) 
  • One cannot directly access XAML (code) of some screen (At least we have not seen how to do that.) 
  • Membership is provided out of box (UI for users management also) and therefore developers are unable to bind some table in his custom DB do for example User in the system 
  • One is unable to hook in some events like an "OK" click on modal window when creating a new item 

No comments:

Post a Comment