Microsoft LightSwitch Broadens Reach with Open Standards

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing & Operations

To keep up with increasingly dynamic market demands, enterprises want data from their line-of-business applications to be accessible at any time from any device without sacrificing quality, agility and time-to-market.  Microsoft LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 was created with these needs in mind.  LightSwitch is a simplified, self-service development tool that enables you to build business applications quickly and easily for the desktop and the cloud.  Microsoft recently announced broader LightSwitch support for open standards that will address the increasing need to build applications that run well across multiple platforms and devices.  

                             

LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 now supports applications across more platforms by using the Open Data (OData) Protocol.  A growing list of websites and applications are exposing their data via OData, and LightSwitch now includes first-class support for connecting your business applications to OData feeds and producing OData services quickly and easily. This coincides with a cross-industry effort underway to buoy broader adoption of the OData Protocol.  Microsoft recently teamed up with several partners, including Citrix, IBM and SAP, to propose an OData Technical Committee within the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), an international open standards consortium.  Check back on the blog in the coming weeks as we report on results from the first OASIS OData Technical Committee meeting, held at Microsoft last week.  

Microsoft also released an early preview of where the next release of LightSwitch is headed, making it easy to build HTML5 clients for a variety of devices. You can try out the HTML Client preview here. And for more info on recent LightSwitch enhancements, see the LightSwitch Developer Center and the LightSwitch Team Blog.