Telerik Extensions for LightSwitch

[Paul Patterson]

Okay, I'll be the one to ask...

Is Telerik planning on creating any extensions for Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch? Microsoft has said they are working with third parties on extensions. Curious if Telerik is one of them.

Cheers,

Paul 

[Vassil]

Hi Paul,

Yes, LightSwitch is on our radar and we will provide extensions for it. As the efforts in their very beginning, I am afraid I cannot share much other than our commitment. As can be evidenced by our product portfolio, we are very aggressive in terms of supporting new Microsoft tools and platforms.

Speaking of LightSwitch, could you tell us more about your needs? What kind of extensions would you like to see from us? Is it just more powerful controls that work within LightSwitch, more appealing themes/templates or is it something else? Also, are you considering this tool for the dev organization as a quick and dirty prototyping tool or you are looking at empowering your business users to create apps without IT involvement?

Your perspective would be much appreciated. 


Kind regards,
Erjan Gavalji
the Telerik team

[Paul Patterson]

Thanks for the quick response Erjan.

Considering the vision for LightSwitch, I would anticipate a need for editor (controls) and theme extensibility. LightSwitch isn't even out in beta yet (due August 23rd), so from a needs perspective it is tough to try and give you some specifics. 

From a business perspective, if we can do more in less time, then the return is obvious. LightSwitch is apparently going to help us do that. So if you talk about usage scenarios, I would suggest that the value of Telerik extensions for LightSwitch would include;

• Telerik Project Type Templates - using Telerik forms and controls.
• Telerik UI Control Extensions - creating new "Telerik" centric screens, or modifying existing LightSwitch generated screens, to use Telerik user controls.
• OpenAccess ORM Extension - extend the existing LightSwitch data designers to use the OpenAccess ORM.

I am following LightSwitch closely because I believe it will have a relativly large impact the development and business community. 

LightSwitch claims to make it easier for developers to create line of business applications quickly. No, it is not necessarily an tool you want to use to create a large enterprise class solution, but LightSwitch should take care of development efforts for a relatively larger number of LOB apps needed in the future.

How many developers out there have been challenged with supporting an Access application created by people with little or no experience? How many organizations have small IT shops where quick one-off Access type applications are deployed only to find the application growing organically - and then becoming really expensive to support and maintain. I've been there and done that. 

Eitherway you look at it, LightSwitch will have an impact and I want to be prepared with the tools that will help me build solutions that are attractive, usable, and provide value to my customers. I use Telerik tools for that now. When LightSwitch comes out and it allows me to create LOB applications faster than using just Visual Studio and Telerik, then I am going to invest in it and use it. If using Visual Studio LightSwitch with Telerik helps me create LOB applications just as fast; then great because I can then go beyond creating a solution that solves a business problem - I can create a solution that looks great too.

For what it is worth, I have been blogging about LightSwitch at http://blog.SelectSystems.ca. Feel free to keep up with the entires because I am going to be following LightSwitch very closely.

Also of note; it was either at the VSLive keynote (video here) or maybe it was the MSDN Channel9 video, I can't remember, where someone mentioned that Microsoft was working with Infragistics on this LightSwitch. I still prefer Telerik though ;)  

Thanks for listening,

Paul

[Paul Patterson]

Okay,

The LightSwitch team just posted an article on their blog (here) about the LightSwitch presentation tier (nice timing). The article has some insight into the extensibility model that will be very helpful to you.

Cheers,

Paul

P.S. Sorry to see another reference to your competitor.

[Erjan Gavalji]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for sharing your vision with us, it is indeed much appreciated!

We're actively monitoring any information and public opinions on LightSwitch. These help us shape better our vision, and in turn, result in better offering.

Cheers,
Erjan Gavalji
the Telerik team

[techvslife]

Does your silverlight timepicker control work in Lightswitch? see for reference:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/lightswitchgeneral/thread/5690c303-e020-42f8-a6c6-e079b6e76aaa

Thank you.

[Milan]

Hi techvslife,

Thank you for your interest in our controls. In general there should be no problem to use our controls in LightSwitch but we will soon initiate an effort to determine if that is indeed true. We will keep you updated on the matter. 

Best wishes,
Milan
the Telerik team

[Paul Patterson]

Yes it does.

Check out Micheal Washington's article on his blog here. I used this as a reference to add a RadTimePicker control to a screen, and bind it. 

Cheers!  

[Milan]

Hello Paul Patterson,

Thank you for sharing this.

Regards,
Milan
the Telerik team

[Doyle]

Like Paul I am all over this Lightswitch thing and I am planning on spending some money on your stuff. If you could support everything you have within the lightswitch environment that would be a big plus... I know you folks can do it... you do some amazing work.

[techvslife]

Thank you but I haven't been able to get the timepicker to work with lightswitch yet. 

I'm in the lightswitch "design screen" page, and I selected custom control in the dropdown box for each time field (the alternative is "not visualized), then in the properties sheet for each time field, I selected "Change" under Custom Control and navigated to:
Telerik.Windows.Controls.Input,
Telerik.Windows.Controls,
RadTimePicker

But even so, the screen that lightswitch created does not include the time fields.

I'll go over the directions again.  Note that lightswich creates an uneditable Data Binding of this form:
FootablenameCollection.SelectedItem.Footimefieldname

--NOTE:  I don't see Silverlight class library as an available type to add under silverlight in the c# section, just Silverlight business app and WCF RIA Class library.

[Paul Patterson]

@techvslife, are you running LightSwitch standalone, or are you using it with VS 2010 Pro or better? You'll need VS 2010 Pro or better installed to take advantage of building control extensions. Not sure that you can build and use custom Silverlight controls using just the standalone. 

Paul

[techvslife]

I am running it with vspro 2010, with all of visual c# installed in the installer option, and with silverlight 4 and silverlight 4 sdk installed.  However I only have two templates under silverlight in the visual c# section.  Was I supposed to install something else?  (visual web maybe?) 

[techvslife]

Ok, I just noticed a minor note in the download for silverlight tools:
Visual Studio Requirements:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 with the Visual Web Developer feature

So I'll plod through the whole installation routine of vs 2010 and then silverlight tools again and see if that makes a difference.
Would have been nice just to select the timepicker control directly as a custom control in lightswitch . . .

p.s. I already tried the devenv.exe trick (I forget the switch name now, /installtemplates or something) but it does not install those silverlight templates.

[Paul Patterson]

For what it's worth, follow this link to my blog post where you can download the VS 2010 solution in which I used the RadTimePicker control.

Note: It's using RadControls for Silverlight Q2 2010 SP1 - sorry community... and your welcome Telerik ;)

Cheers!

[techvslife]

Paul,
Thank you for your detailed post.  The problem as I see it is, do you want to do that for 50 time fields on a screen?  It seems not the best way.  Also, I want the time picker to be the control for the field, not a field in addition.  For example, in this post:
http://lightswitch.adefwebserver.com/Blog/tabid/61/EntryId/2/Creating-A-LightSwitch-Custom-Silverlight-Control.aspx
If you go the screenshot immediately after the heading "Consuming The Silverlight Custom Control" I'd like to have RadTimePicker in the drop down to the left for the original field, MoneyOwed (--I mean the original time field I'm using, e.g. TimeDue) AND I want to use it as the default for ALL time fields / time spans, in the same way as the DatePicker is the default for all date fields etc. 

There probably is some way to do this within the Lightswitch custom code, especially since all my time fields end in "Tme" but I'll have to see. 

The second thing is that we should be able to skip this whole step of going outside Lightswitch and creating a separate project etc., since the control is already registered as a Silverlight control on the computer.

Let me know if I've overlooked something.  
P.S. For Telerik, this link may be useful:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ac1d8eb5-ac8e-45d5-b1e3-efb8e4e3ebd1&displaylang=en


(p.s. I do have the silverlight class library project now, after adding "Visual Web".) 

[techvslife]

offhand, It doesn't seem that it should be necessary to manually type in the binding name (collection and field name) because that is already being passed by lightswitch, if you look at the properties in Lightswitch for each control in a screen, it is passing in the proper value under "Data Binding," i.e. the same value as you are manually typing in the xmal for each and every separate control.

I suspect there is a very simple solution that is quick, that doesn't require manually creating a separate custom control on a field by field basis and manually typining in the binding parameter in xaml etc, but I don't know what it is.  When I directly choose the Telerik timepicker as the custom control for a field in lightswitch, it is not displaying the field on the screen and I am not sure what custom code to add to lightswitch to produce the right effect here.

[techvslife]

Paul,
There may be a more fundamental thing I'm tripping on.  In your blog post, you said:
I used a RadTimePicker control to bound it to a DateTime field in a Customer entity.

Have you successfully bound it to a Time (time only) field (i.e. an sql server 2008 time field, which becomes a .net timespan in the lightswitch entity model)?    I ask because there may be issues peculiar to time fields, which lightswitch seems to have problems with.  (with datetime, light switch already has a working control, but with time fields, it always suppresses them from screen output, as far as I can tell).  thanks.

(---Note: Paul responded to this in his blog post's comments section.)

[techvslife]

Correction to what I wrote below:
The method I give *seems* to work at first, however the value is not actually saved in the backend database nor does Lightswitch know the field has been edited, since the Save button remains greyed out unless you edit another (and non-time) field.  Even if you press Save, the changes to the time field are not saved in the database.  I assume it has something to do with the binding property. 
I have a thread on this here:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/lightswitchgeneral/thread/5690c303-e020-42f8-a6c6-e079b6e76aaa

------------
There's no need to create a custom control.
Here are the directions:

Go to Solution Explorer in Lightswitch.
Switch Solution explorer from logical to file view (one of the top buttons under solution explorer).
Warning: Lightswitch is VERY VERY slow in navigating solution explorer in file view,
 so be patient.
Right-click on "references" underneath the "Client" section.
Select "add reference."
Under .NET, browse to and locate the "Telerik.Windows.Controls.Input" dll
   to add it as a reference.
Now in the design screen, select "custom control" for a time field,
and navigate to and select the RadTimepicker control (under telerik.windows.controls.input,
and then under telerik.windows.controls) for the "custom control" field in properties of that time field.

The free trial version also works but you have a telerik ad displayed briefly.

[techvslife]

Some more information and a code snippet, in case anyone has suggestions:
The Telerik silverlight timepicker control that I'm trying to use in Lightswitch has the following relevant properties:
SetBinding,
SetValue,
GetBindingExpression,
DataContext,
and also this one:
ClockItemsSource  ("Gets or sets a collection of TimeSpan used to generate the content of the clock.  This is a Dependency property"

I'm just not sure how to get the two way binding, or any binding to work here. 
This is the code snippet that I take it will access the control, but perhaps this is the wrong way to go about it:

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.IO;
using System.IO.IsolatedStorage;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Microsoft.LightSwitch;
using Microsoft.LightSwitch.Framework.Client;
using Microsoft.LightSwitch.Presentation;
using Telerik.Windows.Controls;
namespace MyLsTest
{
  public partial class MyScreen
  {
    partial void MyScreen_Loaded()
    {
      IContentItemProxy proxyTme = this.FindControl("EntryTme1");
      proxyTme.Invoke(() =>
        {
          var ctlTme = (Telerik.Windows.Controls.RadTimePicker)proxyTme.Control;
          
          /*What property to set here ? */

        });
    }
  }
}

[Bruce]

Any thoughts on whether Telerik Reporting could be integrated into LightSwitch?  LightSwitch has pretty much nothing for reporting (create an Excel or Word document and print that is their solution).
TIA

[Svetoslav]

Hi Bruce,

Generally speaking Telerik Reporting can be separated in two parts - the reporting engine that is responsible for the processing and rendering of the reports and does not depend on any UI technology and the report viewer controls that allows you to display reports in Windows Forms, Web, WPF or Silverlight applications.

As far as the LightSwitch is concerned, you can use the Silverlight ReportViewer control just like you do with any other Silverlight control, ex. the RadTimePicker discussed below to display the reports.

Telerik Reporting is a part of the Telerik's product family and as such it follows closely the company policy. In this case our policy is to provide full support for the new VisualStudio LightSwitch tool, and this includes our Reporting product.
 

All the best,
Svetoslav
the Telerik team

[Erik Damgaard]

In Lightswitch the different screens are placed in a tab control. If you could adapt you docking-control to Lightswitch so the user could take a screen out of the tab and float it, that would be a very cool feeature.

[George]

Hi Erik,

This is really a very good suggestion! We are considering integrating our RadControls in the LightSwitch and providing full support for this new Visual Studio tool. If you have any other suggestion that we could discuss - please, let us know. It would be very appreciated. 
 

Sincerely yours,
George
the Telerik team

[Erik Damgaard]

I have played around with LightSwitch and data access is great but UI-components is very limited. So as I wrote; your dock control would be fantastic. But again in LightSwitch the menu is too simple, and yours is great. So integrate RadControls into LightSwitch has great potential.

[Henk]

Yes, I think Lightswitch is the RAD way for building LOB applications for Silverlight. The drawback is that the standard UI is not compelling and, standard only for sqlserver and at this point the UI cannot easily changed. Its way of data binding should be an example for Telerik ORM how easy it should make working with RIA services for data binding and connecting the RIA service to a telerik SL control or using the service for validation! Then you have a winning combination: flexible and compelling UI (the strenght of SL) using telerik controls and easy data binding using telerik ORM. At this moment the RIA support in ORM is still too cumbersome, still lot of coding for basic CRUD operations (automatically in the old winform world ;-) ) and limited (especially when u are using Oracle with stored procs/package(functions)/ref cursor) I think the emphasis in the roadmap should not be adding more databases support in ORM but to make it as simple as the Lightswitch way of creating LOB applications!

Henk

[Oscar]

Hello,
I just came across this post and the only way to describe it .... is :  "Beautiful and just what we were looking to hear"

As you can see on our LightSwitch post here
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/lightswitchgeneral/thread/3f6161b6-33a3-4b6a-a4d8-ea693d6ba273

Microsoft LightSwitch will not have a reporting engine (they already made that public) on it's first final Release  for Version 1 (we speculate the date will be around May 2011) , but without reporting for it..

We think the LS Dev. Team  could be waiting for Silverlight 5 future super printing ability to create the LightSwitch reporting engine, thus is they wait for SL5 they will have to delay the release of LightSwitch 1.0... nobody outside Microsoft knows for sure, we can only speculate.

By judging by the decisions the LightSwitch Development team  has taken up to now;
(the best possible decision balancing the fact that we all want LS as soon as possible becasue it reduces the development time in 1/10, that is made to build the best possible Business Application seeking performance )

Now, a lot of us, have customers asking for LightSwitch applications, our only option and hope is reporting is Telerik (judging for the ability in which Telerik handle XAML for their controls  always seeking performance and beauty is unprecedented ),

I read Telerik is considering LightSwitch.... but as you can see the above Microsoft LightSwitch post, many, if not thousands (remember that is Microsoft) will seek Telerik for LightSwitch, first desperately for the reporting, then for your RAD suite becasue LightSwitch will have a SHell (beta 2) that will allow us to create a type of Dashboard using controls, and who has the best controls... Telerik

is anything you could share on the reporting issue  working closely with LightSwitch aside from what is already said on this great post ?

Regards

[B]

I echo Oscar's request on reporting.  What LOB application doesn't have Reporting?  This is the one area Microsoft has really dropped the ball when it comes to Silverlight LOB applications.

Background:
My company currently has a large (100+ screens) multi-tenant LOB ASP.NET application we sell via ASP model.  Our goal is to start converting it to Silverlight in the near future.  (We are soooo tired of cross browser testing for html/ajax/javascript and all the client issues they present.).  Instead of rip and replace...we would like to slowly migrate and/or share certain technology in the ASP.Net app while developing the Silverlight version...thus reducing time/development/risk. 

Why Telerik:
We chose Telerik because we feel your controls particularly the Telerik reporting help us accomplish this goal.  To start, we are currently in the process of converting all the existing reports in the ASP.NET version to Telerik reporting and the Telerik ASP.NET reportviewer.  This will allow us to leverage the same reports (with little or no -rewrite) in the Silverlight version of the application using the Telerik Silverlight ReportViewer.  This is a HUGE time saver for us since there are over 100+ reports we also have to convert. 

Why LightSwitch:
In terms of Silverlight development itself, we've been evaluating a lot of technologies/patterns/tools including Entity Framework 4, WCF Ria Services, MVVM, MEF, XAML, BLEND, Blah Blah Blah....  Obviously this is quite an over-whelming list of things to get up to speed on in order to develop true industrial strength 3 tier LOB applications.  That is where LightSwitch presents many possibilites.  I know it's been marketed by Microsoft as a RAD tool for data entry instensive applications (what business apps aren't), but if it is extensible enough so that it will allow us easily build 70-80% of the UI and drop down into code for the rest ....including adding good reporting and/or custom controls, we will definitely consider using it for Silverlight development.  That way we can focus most of our time on the data model and service layer (EF4 and WCF Ria Services) and let LightSwitch handle most if not all of the UI and Navigation. 

With all that said, anything you can do to enhance the developer experience in LightSwitch using your controls including the Silverlight ReportViewer would be a HUGE win for Telerik customers. 

In terms of specifics, I can't give you any right now because I still need to get up to speed on how LightSwitch extensions work and how to add/develop Themes and Skins.  Right now there is not a  lot of info available on those topics, but I suspect there will be by the time LightSwitch releases.  Anyway, keep up the great work.  We appreciate all you guys do!

[Vassil Petev]

Hi guys,

Yes, there is an obvious opportunity in providing a custom Reporting control for LightSwitch and we will do our best to provide one, as Svetoslav noted on 9/3/2010. Telerik Reporting's viewer depends on our Silverlight controls and right now we are in the process of making sure that our Silverlight controls work in LightSwitch. As soon as this happens, we will provide information on how to use Telerik Reporting's Silverlight viewer in a LS project. As you may know, you can use Telerik OpenAccess in LighSwitch today, so the integration between LS and Telerik will be effortless soon.

We will update this thread as soon as we have something for you guys to play with.


Kind regards,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[edison fernando]

Hi we have not heard if you have extensions
telerik to LightSwitch

reporting 
screens 
themes 

[Vassil Petev]

Hello B,

We do not have anything new. We are waiting for a more complete version of LightSwitch which to test against.


All the best,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[edison fernando]

I wonder if you think about making extensions to LS, since there is no information from you

[Frank]

LightSwitch Beta 2 is out now and it seems as if the RC will be build from it,
is now the time for Telerik to jump in ?

[Vassil Petev]

We will very much appreciate your feedback and share your ideas with us. This will help us provide better support for LightSwitch that will fit your needs. More specifically, we would like to know:
 

• How do you plan to use LightSwitch. Do you plan to use it instead of Access, or will you make data entry business apps?
• What do you envision Telerik to provide for LightSwitch? Controls, forms, reporting, and/or themes? What else?
• Whom should we target? The Developer (you), or the Business User? May be both?

Feel free to share any other ideas that come to mind.

Thanks!

Regards,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[Oscar]

Well the best way to answer this if with the actual forum blogs from the LightSwitch users,

LightSwitch was first intentioned as a Microsoft Access for the web, but it was soon discovered by all developers as the way to develop software for the future

The ability to develop LightSwitch 'modules'
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/lightswitchgeneral/thread/2a047eca-c242-4c80-88ad-89fca73c9f41

could we build ERP system with LS or is just for small app
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/lightswitchgeneral/thread/63720faf-a2d3-48cb-a847-9d5aeb50facb

the truth about Microsoft LightSwitch on the Business Application Development
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/lightswitchgeneral/thread/09783abf-e957-4382-99c4-895ab596617a

What's the ratio of "newbie" questions vs experienced .NET questions on LightSwitch?
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/lightswitchgeneral/thread/8d953e6c-4db7-4758-a380-f5c2f5b7cf52

is Lightswitch positioned as an entry level application generator?
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/lightswitchgeneral/thread/c68f6085-abd3-4016-b79f-8d39af9f3b45

Beta 2: First Words
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/lightswitchgeneral/thread/304471a0-e1fb-4b37-927d-81775340c1c7

you will see why Telerik is needed

Regards..

[Ben Hayat]

Excellent questions Vassil;

I'll also post my request on LS forum for developers to come in here and give you feedback!
..Ben

[edison fernando]

in regards to me like more screen layouts, reports, and controls for business applications

[Ken Morris]

"We will very much appreciate your feedback and share your ideas with us. This will help us provide better support for LightSwitch that will fit your needs. More specifically, we would like to know:

• How do you plan to use LightSwitch. Do you plan to use it instead of Access, or will you make data entry business apps?
• What do you envision Telerik to provide for LightSwitch? Controls, forms, reporting, and/or themes? What else?
• Whom should we target? The Developer (you), or the Business User? May be both?

Feel free to share any other ideas that come to mind.

Thanks!

Regards,
Vassil
the Telerik team "

for our company here are the answers:
we do not use access, we use MS SQL server, we have several cases where we are interested in using LS to add better data / crud to systems that are already live and in production, as an alternative to manually creating more html pages.

what you can bring to the table: 
1) make all the silverlight controls work with LS
2) tools to help developers and designers create themes and shells for LS
3) fill in the gaps in what LS offers, for example a RichText control that works with LS, include a datatype extension so that we can use the ls designer to create a table with a richtext column and have LS know how to manage it in all phazes.

who to target:  both, this is not always easy but there are two levels of how to use LS, the simple WSIWIG and the advanced pro dev.

[Ben Hayat]

Hi Vassil;

I'd like to offer my two cents on different fronts as well;
My points are also including the priority level and what should take place first and next and next...

Cent 1) Being involved with Telerik for several years, I'd say telerik has one of the best tech support I've encounter. And at the same time watching the level of the users of the products, the majority seem to be professional/educated/experienced developers. From these two points, I can conclude the current infrastructure of the support team (which is a big division for any company who cares about customer service) is designed and geared towards pro developers than novice/Business users. In the case of LS that supports two group of users, I think Telerik is more structured, not only to produce product for pro developers, but also support them the pro developers. The novice crowd requires a different support, products and marketing which I'm not sure at this point Telerik has the resources allocated for. So, my vote is to stick to pro developers.

Cent 2) What Products? LS claims that Silverlight controls should be able to be consumed in LS without much difficulty as "User" or "Custom" controls. These type of usage aren't the optimum format to use a third party control in LS, but for some of the cases it will do. My suggestion is to test the current RADControls for Silverlight in LS and make sure as "User Control" they work fine. This group is almost like a given that will work and would be a great introduction of RADControls for those who have not used it.
However, where telerik has always shined and will continue to shine, is to build controls for a specific platforms, i.e. ASP.Net, WinForm, Silverlight, WPF, ORM and etc. I think the next platform is Lightswitch that should receive a series of controls in the form of LS Extensions. Since LS is primarily designed for LoB apps, I would focus to bring over some of the Silverlight controls that work in LoB environment, i.e. GridView, TreeView, Chart, DataFilter, Gauge, MaskedEditBox, Outlookbar, panelbar, RichTextBox, Map, Upload & Reporting.
As the first phase, I'd focus on Extension controls, before Themes or Shell or DataSource or BusinessType.

I think these two paragraphs sums up my points and once phase one is under way, telerik can decide phase two.
..Ben

[Rommel Manalo]

I want to see the telerik controls be wrapped as LightSwitch Extension. Like the LS grid, i want to replace it with your grid.

[Ben Hayat]

I'm very surprised to see anyone has hardly responded to this post or the one we left on the Lightswitch forum regarding third party controls. I don't know how to interpret this lack of response. Does it mean what LS offers out of the box is complete enough that people don't need third party controls or does it mean, not too many Silverlight Pro devs are jumping on LS? Or what?
..Ben

[Vassil Petev]

Hello guys,

Thank you for your excellent feedback so far - do not fear to share anything else that comes to mind. I have forwarded your comments to the Silverlight product manager for review and consideration. We will keep you updated on our decisions regarding LightSwitch.


Regards,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[Bruce]

I think reporting is the achilles heel of LS - making reporting seamless using Telerik reporting would be a big step forward.
HTH

[Cliff McManus]

What do I want? Here is my wish list.

• Seamless Reporting and graphing hooked into LightSwitch. As you can see there is a big opportunity here for Telerik.
• Telerik Silverlight Controls that are easy to integrate or already hooked into the LightSwitch framework.
• A statement that Telerik has made the decision to invest resources in LightSwitch followed by a high level timeline for releases even if it is very rough as in quarters.
• Telerik themes that can be applied to the application.

I intend on writing business applications with LS. I have been using it for 7 months now and have an app in Beta 1 with about 50 windows and 40 entities, so far I am about half way completed.  In my mind this is not just a MS Access replacement it is a rapid development tool for business applications (Forms over data) that gives us many options for deployment.

Thanks for the consideration.
Cliff

[edison fernando]

custom  control print telerik ?

[Rayne]

I plan to use Lightswitch to create data entry business apps. A lot of what I'm doing is migrating databases from an old mainframe system to new MS technologies, so the data exists already. Lightswitch can get my users up and running fairly quickly so they can continue to use the data they are working with, while I add new functionality as needed.

I hope to see Reporting first and foremost, since it's been pretty clear all along that Lightswitch will not include reporting capabilities, along with seamless integration of the silverlight controls, so that properties can be set from within lightswitch.

I'd also like to see some variety of shells, so that we have more options than the one that comes out of the box. Something to aid importing and exporting of data would be extremely helpful. You can already export to Excel from a desktop client, but importing with the ability to map the columns in your file to the columns in the entity/entities, would be even better.

Now that Beta 2 is out with GoLive license, I'm definitely looking at it for my next project at work.

[edison fernando]

when given information about the extensions
proposed here, Telerik does not give much importance to Ligtswitch ?

[Vassil Petev]

Hello Edison,

We simply have nothing more to add to what we said last week - we will update this thread as soon as we have more information on our LightSwitch support.


All the best,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[Rob]

As I see it, LightSwitch is a godsend to RIA Services consultants.  It uses the full stack of the latest technologies like MEF, SL4.0, RIA, WCF, EF, etc, but allows me to build enterprise apps that typically have hundreds upon hundreds of tables, with very little time.  Since data CRUD is about the same for most every app, I can just spend my time on the business logic that is custom to the app and blaze through in a couple days what would normally take weeks of effort.  This means I can underbid others, win more contracts, and gain more loyal customers.  Lightswitch is not another Access or VB, it is a framework and model that allows me to stand on the shoulders of all of MSFT's great tech and climb higher, faster, and farther than others, all to my benefit.  And it is surprisingly customizable given that I can use my own RIA Services Library, my own User Controls and Custom Controls, and extend it rather easily via all the samples in the new extensions cookbook PDF.

That being said, it is important to understand that Lightswitch is very relevant to the Telerik customer.  We need a drop of your control set for LS, and we need it right away.  This is not a particularly difficult task for you guys so I would like to see it first, and soon.  Second, since Telerik as shown to make great sample silverlight "shells" such as your demo shell, I would like to see a few Shells and Themes produced by you guys for LS.  To date, I have not had to buy control suites from any of your competitors and so I have stayed a loyal customer.  But if one of them releases a LS suite first, and I don't have a beta drop or at least a clear roadmap of when one is coming from Telerik, I will have to move on, which I would hate to do.  So please keep us informed and stay transparent!

[Erjan Gavalji]

Guys,

Once again, thank you for the constructive feedback indeed!

In an effort to be transparent (thanks Rob), I just wanted to update you on a small step we did with regards to our LightSwitch interop:
As per my colleague, Vladimir's post, RadControls for Silverlight are very easily integrated to the platform.

Cheers,
Erjan Gavalji
the Telerik team

[Vassil Petev]

Hi guys,

I am pleased to let you know that you can start using Telerik Reporting in LightSwitch Beta 2. It should be quite straight forward, because the Silverlight viewer operates fine in Beta 2 - just check Vladimir's blog with image instructions: How To Use Telerik Reporting in Microsoft LightSwitch Beta 2

Give it a try and let us know what you think.


Kind regards,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[MikeK]

A few weeks ago our local .net user group had their annual conference where one of the speakers was the business unit manager from Microsoft who oversees LightSwitch. I had the opportunity to discuss his (and Microsoft's) plans for LightSwitch.

When I first saw this new product I thought MS was just trying to push out a new Access type of app for the newer technology. It really looks that way, and according to the speaker - it could be used by power users for this purpose. The presentation noted that it was positioned in the VS workspace rather than in the Office workspace, like Access.

What I took out of the conference is that I can make use of this product for probably about 70% of our needs. This means that a lot of projects that are on hold can move forward. Yes, the interface is a bit more basic than what I'd like, but then again they look decent enough. I can STOP people from storing critical information in spreadsheets, which they do now. Funny thing is that the same thing happens at Microsoft - per the program manager. He gave an example of how Microsoft used LightSwitch to replace one of their internal applications no one was using. The staff was keeping their data in spreadsheets ;-}  I love that.

The product shows potential, it's up to us (or me) to identify how to make it work best for our needs. I remember when VB 1 was released, on 2 floppy disks. At that point in time the only way to build a form and put a button on it was to write C++. Suddenly, someone could code something in minutes to do what took infinitely longer (and more skill). You wouldn't want to write an operating system with VB 1, but that wasn't the goal. For something appropriate, it served a purpose and cut down development time. Same here.

What do I want to see in tools or options?

• A method to identify what screens are available to the user and when. I don't want to show the end user all forms all the time. They should only be able to reach specific forms through appropriate actions from the exposed forms.
• A security method to be able to lock functionality of forms, controls, etc. to specific roles.
• A clean method of reporting. From what I've read on this forum, I should be able to do this with Telerik's report package.
• I would love to be able to drop a RadGrid on a form, and hook it up similar to an asp.net ajax RadGrid. We use these ALL the time, and they cover about 98% of our functional needs.
• Be able to drop a style option on the form, like the form decorator and/or style options from asp.net and Winform Telerik packages.

[Paul]

@Vassil,

With all due respect, that referenced article only shows how to add a report control, not how to use it with LightSwitch. 

Almost any Silverlight based control can be added as a custom control to LightSwitch. The value from doing so will be when the control can be bound to the data within LightSwitch.  

The referenced article assumes that the use of the reporting control will be bound to something outside of the scope of LightSwitch itself. Developing in LightSwitch takes a data-centric approach.  This should be considered when posting articles about how to add Telerik controls to LightSwitch.

For example: http://www.paulspatterson.com/technology/lightswitch/microsoft-lightswitch-adding-telerik-silverlight-controls/

I look forward to more information about how to actually bind reports to LightSwitch.

Thanks.

[Vassil Petev]

You are correct, Paul. The thing is that the Silverlight viewer of Telerik Reporting did not work at all in the first version of LightSwitch, thus the blog.


All the best,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[Paul]

Understood, and we do appreciate the efforts Vassil.

Thanks again,

Paul

[Rommel]

Any CTP's yet that we can play around? LS Team released their draft cookbook in LS Extension. 

[Rob]

It's been awhile so checking back in.  Can you push the marketing/products team to release an official statement if Telerik plans to develop extensions for LS?  I'm sure that internally you would have made a go/no-go decision on this for the RTM release of LS.  We need to know if you plan anything...

[Vassil Petev]

Hi Rob,

We do not plan to provide additional LightSwitch-specific development until the Q2 2011 release (due in July). LightSwitch will be discussed once again during our planning meetings for Q3, which will be in late July.


Best wishes,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[Rommel]

You are already 1 step behind the DevExpress.. (http://www.devexpress.com/Subscriptions/DXperience/WhatsNew2011v1/index.xml?page=2).

 They already provided the support for reporting and yet you are still on the early stage whether to support this LS or not.. Hope you can overtake them in the long run if not, sorry but one of your customer might switch to DevExpress.. :)

[Vassil Petev]

We are not letting you go that easy, Rob :)

Check out my post from April 13 - we already support the functionality DevExpress is about to release.


All the best,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[Rommel]

May I see which link are you talking about Vassil?

[Vassil Petev]

 
How To Use Telerik Reporting in Microsoft LightSwitch Beta 2


Greetings,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[Rommel]

Ok, I got it.. I guess I need to wait until July, when decision will be handed over to the public if the Telerik will support the LS Controls as stated in extensibility cookbook provided by the LS Team. Because what you've shown Vassil is just a work around how to use 3rd party controls in LS. I want more like what's the LS team stated in extensibility cookbook. 

:)

[Rob]

Since it is getting closer to "late July", I thought I would bump this thread and ask that you pass along everyone's interest in getting a Telerik control pack and shells into your Q3 planning.

[Vassil Petev]

Hi Rob,

Today we are releasing Q2 2011. We will be discussing the Q3 development in the next couple of weeks. I will keep you updated.


Regards,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[dave]

RTM is July 26.  Any chance you'll have things packaged by then.  Really don't want to have to evaluate other control suites.  Much easier if you guys are just ready to go!

[Ben Hayat]

Dave, I have a lot of faith in Telerik's decision making and approaching things (I wish many others would follow the same). Even if Telerik doesn't show up on the 26th with some quick solutions, it doesn't mean they're ignoring it. I personally trust their timing and approach.

Hope this helps, that the 26th isn't the judgement day :-)
..Ben

[dave]

Agreed that the 26th isn't a big deal, was sounding like they hadn't decieded what to put into a set of lightswitch extensions.  I'm a patient guy, but would really like to be able to do simple things like format rows in a data grid which the MS control doesn't let me do or have the events to handle manually without replacing the grid.  I'm a big fan of the telerik controls, just dont want to a wait a year to start getting value from lightswitch.

dave

[Evan Hutnick]

Hey all,

Not saying we're doing anything special for the 26th... but you may want to stay tuned.  You can rest assured that your professional developer skills and knowledge of Telerik Silverlight controls will work nicely with LightSwitch, after all, it's all Xaml, it's just how to you glue the pieces together that matters.

But if I say anything else I might just get in trouble. :) 

See y'all next Tuesday!

-Evan

[Vassil Petev]

Hello guys,

We are happy to announce Telerik's LightSwitch offering, which we are releasing with the official LightSwitch launch today!
 
The Telerik offering targets professional Silverlight developers, who are familiar with Visual Studio and who plan to use LightSwitch extensively to create LoB apps, but need to extend the default LS screens with rich charts, gauges, grids, and editing capabilities.

Telerik's offering does not require additional installation (other than RadControls for Silverlight) and is composed of several hands-on-labs (details and projects) on how to use our Silverlight controls in LightSwitch.

More labs can be added on demand, so feel free to share your feedback and requests!

Enjoy!


Greetings,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[dave]

Glad to see this posted so quickly.  Great to have this work around guidance that walks developers through the process of databinding with a user control to the telerik silverlight controls.  I hope you guys are also working a long term solution complete with design time support in the lightswitch environment that doesn't require xaml manipulation and works like the rest of the environment.    This gives us the ability to leverage your controls in the places where they are really needed which is a great start.  I hope the long term solution is also underway.

[Ben Hayat]

It's great to see LS RTM is finally coming out the door. This will allow Telerik to move forward. It's been frustrating for Telerik team (as well us) to wait for LS to get to RTM, so we have something to work with.

Let's all stay focus and give feedback to Telerik team as we start using these controls in LS apps.
..Ben

[Ticket Solutions Account]

Hi,

It would be great if there was a scheduler view that we could use. Will there be any Shells or Themes released from Telerik so we can use telerik from end to end in our interfaces?

Kind Regards,
Andrew

[Vassil Petev]

Hello Andrew,

We are working on a SchedulerView Lab. Please, check our LightSwitch page later this week. I will also try to update this thread when it is available.

You can use our current themes within LightSwitch today. We do not plan to add screens at this time though. We are still trying to estimate the interest in LightSwitch in order to decide how to enhance our offering to better suite everyone.


Greetings,
Vassil
the Telerik team

[Ticket Solutions Account]

Hi,

I have the themes installed but they do not appear in the theme drop down for the full lightswitch application. Is there something I need to change to make this work? 

Kind Regards,
Andrew

[Evan Hutnick]

Hey Andrew,

The themes for the Silverlight suite are different than LightSwitch themes, so in order to utilize them you would want to be sure the assembly is included in both Client and ClientGenerated and then set it as needed on your custom control.  Themes are in the same boat as shells, once we can better gauge the community sentiment on LightSwitch and the demand for these we'll plan on what to work on in the future.

For anyone who isn't aware of how to set a theme on their Silverlight controls directly, check out:

Setting a Theme in RadControls for Silverlight

-Evan

[Ticket Solutions Account]

Hi,

Is there an updated ETA on the lightswitch tutorial for SchedulerView?

Kind Regards,
Andrew

[Evan Hutnick]

Hi all,

Apologies for the delay on the ScheduleView lab, the control has some added complexity to it and I wanted to ensure that we captured as much functionality as possible in this lab. :)

The lab will be uploaded on Monday, so enjoy your weekend and look forward to rocking out your LightSwitch applications with RadScheduleView next week!

-Evan

[Evan Hutnick]

Hey folks!  We've still got to update the icon (it is that hot off the presses!), but the RadScheduleView lab is now available!

http://www.telerik.com/products/lightswitch-support.aspx

It's the one in the lower-right corner.  Let us know what you think! :)

[Avrohom Yisroel]

Well, despite the fact that Telerik people keep saying they have support for Lightswitch, it's just not true! You have not added any support for Lightswitch, you have just shown some examples of how to use your existing Silverlight controls in Lightswitch. No big deal there, we have had such examples since Lightswitch was first around.

When are Telerik actually going to produce some Lightswitch-specific stuff? I mean controls that don't require you to add a separate Silverlight class library project and fiddle with XAML pages. When are you going to produce Lightswitch themes and shells?

Your competitors are leaving you way behind here. They are all working hard on producing components specifically designed for Lightswitch. Are Telerik going to do anything? If not, you'll be losing a lot of customers. Why would people cause themselves extra work to use your controls when other people's can be used so easily?

Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with the Telerik controls, and the support is good, but if you aren't going to provide proper support for Lightswitch, many of us will go to someone else. I for one don't want to, but I can't afford to get left behind.

Please clarify if you are actually going to be producing any genuine Lightswitch products, or just more examples of how to use your Silverlight controls.

[Evan Hutnick]

Hi Avrohom,

Right now we are being quite honest about our approach with LightSwitch and have been since the beginning.  This is a brand new platform, based on Silverlight, that is stepping into an untested market, therefore it is a challenge to dive right in and understand the needs and requirements of a typical LightSwitch dev without seeing how the market pans out.  What we have seen, however, is early and continued adoption by developers who have been working with both Visual Studio and Silverlight already, meaning they aren't afraid to get their hands dirty by writing a little code.  This also means that the resources we are creating are targeted at those developers. 

If we are to go the full extensions route we need to know what developers are looking for in extensions.  Right now the extension model offers some great compatibility for creating wrappers around existing controls to allow the controls to be more or less property-driven via the LightSwitch interface, but if you look at a control like RadGridView we have 70+ demos sitting in our QSF highlighting different setups, scenarios, and customizations that can be done with and to the control.  If we turn it into an extension we basically need to figure out what common feature set will be used across the board in the most scenarios... or have a properties window with like a hundred options for enabling different scenarios.  Don't even get me started on how much crazier you can get with a control like RadChart that allows multiple series, stacked series, different chart types, etc...

For anyone looking for official extensions for LightSwitch the best route to take is to let us know what you'd like to see.  We can take the conversations private (I'm reachable at hutnick at telerik.com) if you'd like to discuss your particular scenarios further, but otherwise the best way for us to know what LightSwitch developers need is to have these conversations with actual LightSwitch developers.

My personal opinion, spoken as a Silverlight geek and MVP, is that if you have access to Visual Studio Pro+ and LightSwitch to continue to go the custom control route like we're providing guidance for.  This gives you access to as much or as little of the feature-set as you need in your application, allows you to basically copy and paste the plumbing code needed to get the controls running, and ensures you'll never run into a scenario where an option you know exists in Control Suite X but isn't floated to a property you can access in LightSwitch Extension X.  (I personally would want the power, responsiveness, and stability of a control suite that has been around since SL1 and continues to innovate and improve than any trimmed-down versions!)  If you are purely a LightSwitch dev, let us know what options and features make the most sense for the types of apps you are looking to develop, that way if/when we go the extension route we'll have real data from LS developers and won't have to make assumptions on what we *think* you'll want to use.  End result?  Better products aimed at the developer community based on feedback from that community. :)

-Evan

P.S.- If we were truly concerned about the extension offerings from the competition we could have rushed to market with a quick series of extensions, but a) we're not that worried about their offerings, and b) we respect our customers too much for that.  We'd rather produce a quality product based on community feedback and discussion than rushing to market and paying the price for that down the road.

[Avrohom Yisroel]

Hi Evan,

Thanks for the reply. I understand what you're saying, but to address your points in turn...

1) I think you can see by now that Lightswitch isn't going away, nor is it a passing fad. It's gaining a huge amount of support, and is hot news. That's only going to increase as more people come on board, and developers learn how to do more with it. Your questions now should be directed at what you can produce for Lightswitch, not if you should produce anything at all.

2) As far as what people want, well I would say two things. First off, I imagine a very common request would be a quick and simple way to use the controls in Lightswitch. I know we can write user controls to wrap yours up, but that's messy and time-consuming. If you did this for us, it would increase development speed for us. I know you are faced with some tough questions with the more complex controls, but even if you started with the simpler ones, where there is an obvious binding (such as a textbox or combobox), that would be a start.

For the more complex ones, you would have to consider how you can integrate the controls to make it as easy as possible for the Lightswitch developer to use. Obviously the more complex scenarios would require dropping into user controls, but if you can cover the more straightforward cases, you would be giving us a great benefit. As developers, we aren't afraid to write code when it's needed, but having seen how much you can do with Lightswitch without writing code, it would be nice to extend that to your controls.

Second point I would make here is that if you spend some time in the MSDN Lightswitch forums, you can see what people want. It's quite active in there, and there are a lot of discussions going on about what people want. If you get involved in the discussions, you can get a good idea of where you can help us, and you'd also be able to show people how to make the most of you controls in Lightswitch.

As for other features, there are quite a few areas that you can address that aren't covered by your current Silverlight controls at all. For example, you could produce some Lightswitch themes to match the themes you have for your controls. That way, we can skin the whole application, not just the Telerik controls. I currently have a Lightswitch app which uses a RadRichTextBox, and it looks pretty out of place as the theme is totally inconsistent with the rest of the app.

You could also produce custom shells. That's a great way to allow us to give our Lightswitch apps a more individual feel, without the work of writing the shell ourselves. These are both areas where your current products can't be used.

You might not be worried about the competition, but plenty of Lightswitch are looking at them very seriously. It would be worth you doing something public, if only to show the community that you are serious about supporting Lightswitch. I agree that it's not good to rush out poor quality, but on the other hand, you need to show that you're doing something. Your current customers would also be comformted to hear this, as you can see from the comments earlier in this thread.

Anyway, thanks again for the reply.

[Robert]

Thanks for the examples and starter documents for the LightSwitch integration.  I am experimenting with the RadControls for SilverLight in LightSwitch 2011 with VS2010Pro.

The RadScheduleView control lab shows a simple way to implement the SilverLight version of RadScheduleView into a LightSwitch project without first creating a LightSwitch Extensibility Project. 

I believe the demand for LightSwitch extensibility controls will increase as it's visibility and popularity increases, but it appears some developers are coming to expect VSIX installers, rather than extending SL4 controls.

I have been successful in bringing in the RadShceduler control into my LS project, and have taken code samples from the SL demos with some success.  I know I still have more to learn more nuances of data binding, especially when I want dynamic values for resources and RadContextMenu ViewModels.  If you could enhance your examples to include nested controls and data binding in these ways, it would be useful to me.

Thanks again,

Robert

[Daniel Varrin]

Hi,

I want to use a RadScheduleView in a LightSwitch application. I've followed the process explaining how to create custom control containing a RadScheduleView to be able to use it in Lightswitch. It was working fine, but then I wanted to add some group headers. The problem is that the first time I open the screen the groups don't appear and I've to chose an other View and come back to the day view to see the groups. Also when I create an appointment, even when I select the second group resource, the appointment appears then in the first group.

Would it be possible perhaps to update the Hand-on-labs "ScheduleView in Lightswitch" to show more advanced stuffs such as the group headers and read-only slots?

Any idea?

[Daniel Varrin]

I've found the error.

I put the code of Dispatcher.Invoke in the Load method instead of the method getting the appointments. Now it works :-))

[Daniel Varrin]

Hi,

A question about the way to use Telerik controls in Lightswitch. I've read the document explaining how to use the RadscheduleView in Lightswitch.
What I don't understand is

1) why we have to use a dispatcher?
2) why we cannot simply use data binding to the Screen viewmodel in the XAML code? Couldn't we create a CustomAppointment entity in Lightswitch and then in the Custom Control Library we create a partial class with the same name and inherit from Appointment?

[Daniel Varrin]

Well, using partial is not possible as the entity classes are sealed. But what about the use of a MVVM pattern?

[Evan Hutnick]

Dispatcher is used in order to avoid threading issues, as we're manually maintaining handling the data back and forth between LightSwitch and our Silverlight custom control (which wraps a UI component). If we utilize an ObservableCollection or otherwise don't send info via the Dispatcher you begin to see threading errors popping up.
As far as using MVVM pattern, this begins to layer added complexities onto what is supposed to be a simple forms-over-data application that's already getting added complexity by getting a custom component like RadScheduleView working with it. ScheduleView wasn't intended to work with LightSwitch and is designed to be used in full Silverlight applications, meaning that we have to get our hands dirty a bit to ensure that operations that were intended to be performed via code and more complex Xaml scenarios will play nicely with the LightSwitch model.
Thinking about it one way, we are kind of doing MVVM (someone will surely yell at me for saying that) - LightSwitch has the model that handles all the data, the screen which contains our custom control is the view, except in this case the viewmodel is more or less the control wrapper we're creating to ensure the screen data shows up on the screen and that actions performed on the screen make their way back into the model.
All that said - what we've put into these labs is only one way to get this all working and you may find other implementations that work better for your scenario. As I mentioned above, our controls were designed for the full Silverlight framework and we're just showing you the hooks and helping to avoid some of the pitfalls that come with working them into LightSwitch solutions. Everything works one way or another, it's just a matter of ensuring the component and LightSwitch play nice via a wrapper layer that attempts to handle all situations where LS and RCfS don't see eye to eye and our creativity as developers plays a major role in making this happen. :)

[Daniel Varrin]

Thank you for your answer Evan!

I was asking about MVVM, because I couldn't really understand why we cannot use databinding for this control. I've read an other tutorial on how to use such a control in Lightswitch and also with you answer I understand better.

Thanks to you again :-))

[Jdorak]

I have been a loyal Telerik user for about 2 years after I switched from Infragistics. I am really hoping Telerik up their game and release at the very least 1 custom shell extension for Lightswitch. I had to purchase the Infragistics one to test on a project I am working on right now, but I just hate to mix controls from the 2 companies.

Please Telerik team gives us some crumbs here.. :)

[Vassil Petev]

Hello Rtelles,

Thank you for the feedback. We will be reviewing our LightSwitch plans after the Q3 release next month. I am afraid we do no have anything else planned for LS for the Q3 release.

Keep an eye on our roadmap for more information. 


Greetings,
Vassil Petev
the Telerik team

[Jdorak]

Hopefully there is something coming out in Q1 of next year. Lightswitch is here to stay and Microsoft is pushing it big time. I am just a bit surprised that Telerik embraced the CAB and Prism rather quickly, yet is taking small steps with Lightswitch. Anyhow thanksfir the update Vlad.

[Jdorak]

Oopps sorry I meant thanks Vassil. Damn iphone auto correct :)

[Vassil Petev]

No worries, Rtelles, all is good. Once again, thanks for the feedback.


Regards,
Vassil Petev
the Telerik team

[Avrohom Yisroel]

I must say that I am very disappointed in Telerik's lack of action on this. You have a wealth of material that could be adapted to Lightswitch, plus an obviously talented team that could develop new controls, themes, shells, etc very quickly, and yet you are delaying making a decision.

I for one am seriously considering switching to another vendor. You are the only ones who haven't already released products for Lightswitch, and you haven't even decided if you're going to yet. Not very encouraging.

[dave]

Agreed entirely.  For the first time in many years, Telerik is in last place instead of leading the pack of control developers.Without a path forward for lightswitch I will not be renewing support.

[MikeK]

Wow, I see the community are really ganging up and beating down Telerik on this one!

I have to say that I'd expect Telerik to be at the front of this new application as well. Kind of disappointed myself, but with the feedback and threats seen in this thread I'd think that creating LightSwitch extensions would now move up a few notches in priority.

Telerik - is this true?

We have 5 suite licenses that I'm responsible for at work. I slated LightSwitch as one of the technologies that our development team will support, but I haven't moved any of our team into production work yet. One of the reasons is lack of Telerik support in this area. I need to see a committment to supporting LightSwitch with extensions before I do so, and a timeline of when.

Will 2012 Q1 be the target for a release of extensions?

We have a huge investment in Telerik knowledge for all of our internal applications. I really don't want to look at other 3rd party controls, so I can wait on this if I have a general target date.

[John]

Similar view here. My renewal is due in November. Love Telerik but have switched from Ironspeed to Lightswitch as my RAD tool and need easy to plug scheduler, editor and the rest. Have managed to get the scheduler working in Lightswitch, sort of, but it is a bit clunky and far from fully customised. All I need is a sign of real commitment from Telerik to Lightswitch or I will have to look at C1 or similar. Dont want to...

Anyone got any first hand insights into Microsofts plans for Lightswitch? I have seen only speculative comment.

[MikeK]

The program manager for this product from Microsoft was at a "Deeper in .net" conference here in Milwaukee a few months ago, while in Beta 2. He's the guy in the webcast for the product. I had a good half hour one on one discussion with him about this product, where they placed it, and what their goal was with it.

One of my developers brought this up in the past, I looked at it and blew it off. I told this to the program manager - that they did an awful job of marketing this product. Couldn't figure out where they positioned it. He answered my questions and I feel I understand it enough to make it one of our supported technologies for our team.

They created this product for the simple reason of being able to build line of business apps MUCH faster than what's currently available. Their idea that any goofball in an office that might be able to create macros in Excel could use this app is a bad idea, not only by myself but by 300 other developers in the audience. The goal of speeding up app development is good, and this product does seem to fit this goal rather well.

As he explained, we get an awful lot of requests in that we have to turn away since we just can't fit everything into our schedules. This product is positioned to allow us to create quick apps that are still checked into source code control, and follow best practices. A LOT better than allowing the hack to push out Excel macro apps all over the place (as I've seen way too often, including here).

Not wanting to defend Microsoft for anything, just listing what I've been told...  they spent about 3 years on this product, it wasn't just an idea they grabbed out of the air. They've used it internally as well. I loved the story he told about Microsoft creating all kinds of standard applications that their departments HAD to use, but didn't. Too difficult - so the departments resorted to spreadsheets. Same I've seen everywhere! They created a Lightswitch app in a day that fit the bill, and had 3 revisions that required recoding, and finished the entire app within 2 weeks including some custom Silverlight development.

If Telerik supports this process, I could see about 70% of our work being done in Lightswitch, and being able to capture a LOT more requests for work within our enterprise. We have over 1000 employees and 18 locations to support, all with just 5 developers at present.

I grilled the program manager before I committed to the product. Just my two cents, for what it's worth.

[John]

Very interesting MikeK. So Microsoft created this product for one niche but now we find it fits into another. To join the speculators I would say that means they now dont know what to do with it and neither do Telerik. Leaves us wondering which product(s) to bet on. At least Telerik now know we want them to take LS seriously.

[Avrohom Yisroel]

John,

If you read the discussions that have been going on in the MSDN Lightswitch forums, it seems that Microsoft totally misunderstood the target market for Lightswitch. They were aiming it at IT pros who would previously have used Excel or Access to drum up an in-house app. They didn't expect it to be taken up so well by professional developers. One of the main problems the Lightswitch developer community has had is persuading Microsoft to put our wishes into the development plans. We are slowly making headway, but they have been quite recalcitrant about it.

All of which is nothing to do with Telerik of course. However Microsoft see the product, they are very clearly developing it hard, and are planning big things for the future. Telerik on the other hand can't seem to decide if it's worth their while even bothering with it, which is more the issue we need to discuss here. My current feeling is that if they are so blase about it after the rapid take-up it's had, then I am going to be looking elsewhere for support. Even if telerik decide to support Lightswitch, this decision isn't going to come for some time yet, and then we have to wait until they develop the products and release them. I don't see why I should wait that long, when other vendors already have products in the marketplace.

Sorry Telerik, but you've made a major mistake here, and Vassil's statement of a few hours ago does absolutely nothing to reassure us that you're even going to bother supporting Lightswitch. Can't say I'm looking forward to switching vendors, but I don't see why I should pay you if you don't support your customers.

[dave]

I understand the hesitance to get into lightswitch on telerik's part.  This product has been designed as a model driven development envrionment.  Long term I fully expect to be able to build html5, metro xaml and out future output types.  That will impact control vendors more then LOB developers.  That said, that's why we pay for support year over year.  This platform will be a major part of most enteprise dev strategies as a way to cope with decreasing budgets and increasing expectations.  Telerik needs to step up on this, we've been very patient

[Cliff McManus]

Now that discussion is heating up on this I want to get my two cents in also.

 

I also see the promise of Lightswitch. As a matter of fact I am banking my company on it as we develop our flag ship product. I purchased copies of the Silverlight and Reporting suite from Telerik due to the percieved ease of integration of the tools with Lightswitch.  I am finding these controlls harder to integrate than expected and looking rather clunky as I flow from LS screens to Telerik Controls. However this may be due to our lack of skill with Telerik tools, after all we are new to your product.

 

I ask you to take the outstanding controls you have and wrap them in such a way that they can easily and fully be integrated into the Lightswitch world. Please consider this as another vote for a seamless integration of your Silverlight and Reporting controls with Lightswitch.

 

Thanks

Cliff

[Rob]

The competition is releasing a full control suite including their centerpiece grid control in two weeks.  Since my renewal is coming up in November at Telerik, I do believe that I will be switching away from Telerik.  

[Vassil Petev]

Hello guys,

At the end of July, when Microsoft released LightSwitch (and we released our LS packages), we were uncertain who was the primary target of this product, as was the whole market. The product was called Visual Studio LightSwitch, which meant developers. At the same time Microsoft positioned the product to target IT and business users. Since we were uncertain, we decided to target the developer (rather than IT and the business person), and we may have been unfortunate to decide so. We did this to measure the interest in LightSwitch, and we now have the data we needed.

We are seeing fair interest in LightSwitch. We know that Microsoft will be working on a new version. And we know what you think about it. For these reasons we will be discussing our LS plans as soon as Q3 is released, which will happen in a few weeks. We are afraid that we cannot spare any development time on LightSwitch before Q3.

This said, I am discussing the idea with the respective Telerik brand managers to provide you with a feedback form on how you envision the Telerik LightSwitch package. Stay tuned.
 

All the best,
Vassil Petev
the Telerik team

[edison fernando]

thanks telerik 

[Qloud Pty Ltd]

Scheduleview Control is a very helpful for appointment. Is there any examples are available ? to integrate light switch tables data in to the control as a dropdown when creating an appointment.

Regards
Rama

[Qloud Pty Ltd]

Scheduleview Control is a very helpful for appointment. Is there any examples are available ? to integrate light switch tables data in to the control as a dropdown when creating an appointment.

Regards
Rama

[Qloud Pty Ltd]

Hi Daniel.

Did you found any solution? how to call resources, contacts tables in to RADScheduler ?

We can't able to find out how to call the light switch table colums in to the control when creating an appointment


Regards
Rama

[Daniel Varrin]

Hi Rama,

Ivo from Telerik has created a great sample project explaining how to use custom appointments. You can download it here:

http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/silverlight/scheduleview/custom-appointments-and-appointment-template.aspx

Cheers,
Daniel

[Daniel Varrin]

-

[RickC]

I think some patience is required here. There are a lot of new technologies coming down the road and Telerik has been active on hitting Windows Phone and their new Kendo release since even Microsoft is putting a huge emphasis on HTML5 and Javascript for Windows 8. It's clear that HTML5 and Javascript are going to be critical platforms moving forward. With all the waffling Microsoft was doing last spring about Silverlight it is understandable that Telerik chose a 'wait and see attitude' about Lightswitch.

Rick

[Vassil Petev]

Thank you for the understanding and support, Rick.

Guys,
After some internal discussion, we have decided to wait for some news on the next version of LightSwitch which will hopefully put is in a better position to plan the Telerik LightSwitch suite. It will only be afterwards when we'll announce the survey to get your feedback.

We are very sorry that we cannot provide you with anything certain at this time.
 

Greetings,
Vassil Petev
the Telerik team

[Rayne]

I can certainly understand waiting to see where this thing goes. 

One of the things stopping me from using RadControls to extend my LS apps is the theming issue. I'm not skilled enough to completely re-design the appearance of the controls to match LS styles. Maybe you could release a set of styles (that we could apply manually if needed) or a new theme for your controls while we wait for word on full implementation. This would definitely help, because then I could use the RadControls to get around some of the LS limitations.

[Avrohom Yisroel]

Can't say I'm impressed with Telerik's decision on this. Version 2 could be a year off, or 6-9 months at the very least. By the time Telerik get around to making a decision, and then doing some development, the world will be talking about the Next Big Thing, and Telerik will decide that it's still not time to do anything.

Sorry guys, but we pay you to do this development, not to sit around while your competitors release product after product aimed at markets you're ignoring.

Rayne's point is certainly a good one. At the very least, some themes woudl be useful, so we can use the Silverlight controls right now. I have a rich text editor in one of my LS apps, and it sticks out like a sore thumb because of the heavy styling that is in stark contrast to the LS theme. It can't be hard to produce some themes for these controls, and at least that would give us something.

[dave]

Very disapointed with Telerik on this.  In all fairness it's a reflection of Microsoft as well.  The lack of clarity on Microsoft's part is driving poor support from a partner that has traditionally done great work for on the Microsoft platform.  All things considered lightswitch is the safeest platform to build microsoft applications on due to the model driven development and mvvm architecture.  While the UI currently renders a xap, the abstraction is more future proof then developing in any production microsoft technology such as wpf, winforms, or silverlight directly.  I understand the communication is lacking here, but really expect the ISVs to step up and fill the gaps.  Disapointed in the teams decision here.

[Ticket Solutions Account]

Hi,

http://lightswitchhelpwebsite.com/Blog/tabid/61/EntryId/85/A-Groundbreaking-Control-ComponentOne-Scheduler-LightSwitch-Extension.aspx 

If you could build a project that could just be added as a reference or an intemediate reference to add this sort of functionality to lightswitch would be great. I have basic scheduling work done but this is a lot more advanced.

Kind Regards,
Andrew

[John]

Just some quick thoughts from a business user perspective, I would like to see a Telerik Form Builder for Lightswitch. I would like to pick the type of form then select the options for the Telerik controls that make the form. For a control such as scheduler that could be selected as a screen that creates a table that we can add to. If the controls require fields in the DB to be persistant then I could select the table to add the fields to or create a new table if none exist. As mentioned in other posts here I would like to see MS Access type functionality as it is widley used in the business perspective.

I downloaded the schedular lab but when I tried to add the Telerik references they were not in the list. Any advise on what I might have done incorrectly? TIA, JL

[Avrohom Yisroel]

Sorry John, but if you're looking for Lightswitch support, forget about Telerik. They have made it pretty clear that they aren't interested.

You can join the growing number of people looking at other component vendors. Shame, as Telerik have some great stuff, but I don't see why we should pay them to be left behind, when other component vendors are actively supporting the product..

[John]

I can see their reasoning on waiting. There is much speculation in the LS community on what v2 will encompass. As LS is still a fledgling product and MS has hinted that it may move LS from Silverlight to HTML5 I would probably wait as well. As I am still in the learning stage I may be speaking out of turn but from a business perspective it is understandable.

[Avrohom Yisroel]

Maybe, maybe not. Given that LS controls are (currently) just SL controls wrapped up, it's not actually that hard to produce them. Other component vendors are doing it, and there's no reason why Telerik can't. Irrespective of what v2 brings, the SL aspect of Ls will hang around for some time to come. There's too much user code out there already.

Bottom line is that other people are producing stuff for LS and Telerik aren't. I know who's going to get my vote!

[John]

Check out DockShell

DockShell is a LightSwitch Shell extension which wraps Telerik Rad Dock and Ribbon in a provider model.

There is some decent funtional documentation on DockShell located here.  


Cheers

[Avrohom Yisroel]

Time to raise this issue again :)

On 22 Nov '11, Vassil said "After some internal discussion, we have decided to wait for some news on the next version of LightSwitch which will hopefully put is in a better position to plan the Telerik LightSwitch suite."

Well, the beta of v2 has been out for some time, and it's clearly based on Silverlight. Along with the huge wave of interest there was in v1, there has been a lot of interest in v2, and Lightswitch is gaining momentum all the time.

It's clear to everyone outside of Telerik that you are in a perfect position to create extensions for Lightswitch based on your existing Silverlight controls. Let me repeat again what has already been said in this post (and elsewhere) that I am not talking about labs showing us how to use the SL controls in LS, I'm talking about controls directly targeted at LS. This is not something that should take a great deal of time, but would be hugely useful to LS developers.

Even if you just produce LS versions of your existing controls, and didn't give us anything else, that would be a huge productivity boost. Why aren't you doing anything? Why do we have to keep begging for something that is so straightforward for you?

Again, other vendors are doing it, why aren't you?

[Nikolay]

Hi there,

I apologize for the late reply. For the time being, there is no certain plan we can reveal and commit to any delivery dates. I agree that there is a great opportunity in v2 and this is something that we'll have to thoroughly consider on our end. I hope we'll be able to share some good news soon.

Regards,
Nick
the Telerik team

[Avrohom Yisroel]

Nick,

Sorry, but I for one am getting very tired of hearing the same poor excuse. How long are you going to spend considering it, when it's obvious that the product has taken off in a huge way, the next version isn't going to include any major changes that will result in your work being wasted, and your competitors are producing products whilst you sit around considering the matter.

I went for a Telerik subscription in the first place because I was impressed with the way the company supports the community, but you've really let us down here. This constant "we're still thinking about it" attitude gives a very poor impression. If that's the best you can do, then I will be looking elsewhere when my Telerik subscription runs out.

[Vít Kymla]

I'd like to second Avrohom Yisroel opinion. It's been a long time since LightSwitch was released. Now there is version 2011 and even version 2012 RC is available. Visual studio with version 2012 RTM is out and will be available on 15th August. How long will it take for Telerik to wake up and prepare some LightSwitch extension with its amazing controls we love to use? ;)

[John]

Could not agree more with the excellent Telerik controls statement. Check out the DockShell Microsoft LightSwitch Shell for Telerik found at www.softlandingcanada.com called DockShell. Lots of demo videos that show you how it wraps Telerik navigation and layout controls. Provides source code for wrapper projects. Free evaluation for VS 2010 or VS 2012 RC in VB.Net or C#.

[dave]

Not sure why this is such a struggle for telerik.  When the day 1 keynote at tech-ed talks about the next generation of microsoft appliations in direct referece to lightswitch I just can't understand why telerik hasn't made this a priority.

Lightswitch is the one platform designed to help migitigate the serious risk associated with the transition happening from a PC based application world to a world of continous services and connected devices.  Lightswitch as a model driven development enviroinment allows for an application with robust services, ef, and mutliple technology specific clients.  From the desktop focus MDI style interfaces of the current silveright client to the sdi html companion to the whole list of future clients that will be added in the future focused on metro, office, and whatever other future app platforms evolve; Telerik really needs to commit to this platform embrace the opportuntity for their tools to help drive a consitent experiance across a variety of clients from a single application.

I understand that Telerik wanted to wait and see.  I think the future path should be very clear,if not, watch the videos from teched to see why this multi-client mvvm based development platform is the safest bet for anyone making development investments right now.

[Alaforte]

Any news about Lightswich in Telerik?. In particoular I'm interested in web development with html 5 kendo controls.

[Nikolay]

Hi there,

Our position remains the same at this stage.

"For the time being, there is no certain plan we can reveal and commit to any delivery dates. I agree that there is a great opportunity in v2 and this is something that we'll have to thoroughly consider on our end. I hope we'll be able to share some good news soon".

We will make sure to follow up in this thread for any updates.
 
Kind regards,
Nick
the Telerik team

[sadasd assadasd]

A treeview is really a major control missing from the lightswitch default control set. having one is really a great value...

[Avrohom Yisroel]

Forget it, they aren't interested.

Well, my subscription has just expired, and I'm off to see what the other vendors are doing. If Telerik aren't going to support Lightswitch, I'll move to someone who does.

[ShareDocs]

Hi,
anything new? 
is there's a chance to get a working example of teleriks gridview in lightswtich as an extension rather that custom user control?
I tried to make it work (partly succeeded using custom user control but it is not fit to my project needs of elasticity).

how do i get it to work without moving to infragistics/componentone alternatives... 

any help will be much appreciated

[dave]

With the new HTML client any jquery or jquery mobile control can be used. I'm not sure if this makes the story from telerick any better. My volume licenses are expiring and I'd like to understand how you can support the future of sharepoint and office development before choosing to renew. Any insights into telerik and the HTML lightswitch would be appreciated

[Sebastian]

Hello Paul,

Although we have not tested extensively our Kendo UI framework in MS Lightswitch (HTML version), we have not received any reports for issues in this dev environment. Since our framework is based on jQuery core, as long as Lightswitch supports jQuery, we should be compatible with it either.

As for our future support for SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 - you should be able to integrate Kendo UI in both, provided they are extendable with client libraries based on jQuery. Also note that older versions of SharePoint and web parts development, along with ready-to-use web parts, are supported by our ASP.NET AJAX controls.

Best regards,
Sebastian
the Telerik team

[Christian]

Hello After half a year a demand: there is something new? For years I use the components in Windows Forms and Web projects. A seamless integration in LightSwitch would be very helpful. I would be grateful for any information. Christian Raj Hello After half a year a demand (the last message is from August 27, 2012): Is there something new? For years I use the components in Windows Forms and Web projects. A seamless integration in LightSwitch would be very helpful. I would be grateful for any information. Christian Rudat

[Dimitrina]

Hello,

I'm afraid that we do not have Lightswitch extensions and/or examples related to Lightswitch extensions. You can check this page for more information about how to integrate various Telerik Silverlight components with Lightswitch. 

Regards,
Didie
the Telerik team

[Christian]

Hello

This is a little sad. Telerik's motto is "deliver more than expected", here is it 'deliver less than needed'. I think LightSwitch is a significant way to the fast developing smaller applications. For this reason, other vendors have tools on sale. But I want to use only one tool set. I believe that the development in the field of WinForms will grind to a halt. Therefore, it should give the opportunity, to expand the LightSwitch support. It would be nice if there was a statement about the planning.

With kind regards

Christian Rudat

[Zack]

Can someone tell me how to edit the control for RadTimePicker in lightswitch. I know lightswitch doesn't expose XAML but I need to change the default to 24 hour format and I cannot find info on how to accomplish this.
Thanks

[ShareDocs]

Zack hi,
I think it's best that you start a new thread so this thread will be dedicated to any change telerik might do regarding lightswitch.

as for your question:
if you do it through a user control please follow the instructions on: Lightswitch RC - Costum Control - Telerik Grid . do read the whole thread before trying to build it yourself, as it states the difference between LS 2011 and LS 2012.

Another way to accomplish this is by a lightswitch extension - Walkthrough: Creating a Value Control Extension.

Bare in mind that LightSwitch integration is not fully supported.