LightSwitch 2011 released

Back in August last year, Microsoft announced a new edition to the Visual Studio family entitled "LightSwitch". Now, LightSwitch has shed its beta label and is available as a full-blown product from MSDN.

LightSwitch is aimed at business personnel who may not have expertise in development, but still wish to put together a simple application to help them manage their workflow, improve performance, or bring about another business benefit without incurring development team costs.

The benefit of starting up a LightSwitch project is that if one day you need to add some more complex functionality, it is easy for developers to do so: in the background is a .NET project that can be loaded into a standard Visual Studio instance and edited where required.

LightSwitch comes with some other features that will be welcome to businesses. It is extremely simple to deploy applications to Windows Azure, for example, and therefore extremely easy to scale them up if required. There is also an extension framework, which allows developers to create templates or add features if required.

LightSwitch is available from MSDN today. If you don't have MSDN, you can download a 90-day trial, or wait for general availability on Thursday. There's more on the release from the LightSwitch team.

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