As promised, I intend to spend some time today with LightSwitch, and see how it works. Expect a series of post on the topic. In order to make this a read scenario, I decided that that a simple app recording animals and their feed schedule is appropriately simple.

I created the following table:

Note that it has a calculated field, which is computed using:

There are several things to note here:

• ReSharper doesn’t work with LightSwitch, which is a big minus to me.
• The decision to use partial methods had resulted in really ugly code.
• Why is the class called Animals? I would expect to find an inflector at work here.
• Yes, the actual calculation is crap, I know.

This error kept appearing at random:

It appears to be a known issue, but it is incredibly annoying.

This is actually really interesting:

• You can’t really work with the app unless you are running in debug mode. That isn’t the way I usually work, so it is a bit annoying.
• More importantly, it confirms that this is indeed KittyHawk, which was a secret project in 2008 MVP Summit that had some hilarious aspects.

There is something that is really interesting, it takes roughly 5 – 10 seconds to start a LS application. That is a huge amount of time. I am guessing, but I would say that a lot of that is because the entire UI is built dynamically from the data source.

That would be problematic, but acceptable, except that it takes seconds to load data even after the app has been running for a while. For example, take a look here:

This is running on a quad core, 8 GB machine, in 2 tiers mode. It takes about 1 – 2 seconds to load each screen. I was actually able to capture a screen half way loaded. Yes, it is beta, I know. Yes, perf probably isn’t a priority yet, but that is still worrying.

Another issue is that while Visual Studio is very slow, busy about 50% of the time. This is when the LS app is running or not. As an a side issue, it is hard to know if the problem is with LS or VS, because of all the problems that VS has normally.

As an example of that, this is me trying to open the UserCode, it took about 10 seconds to do so.

What I like about LS is that getting to a working CRUD sample is very quick. But the problems there are pretty big, even at a cursory examination. More detailed posts touching each topic are coming shortly.

Microsoft LightSwitch is a new 4GL tool from Microsoft, this is another in the series of “you don’t have to write any code” tools that I have seen.

Those are the tools that will give the secretary the ability to create applications and eliminate the need for coders. The industry has been chasing those tools since the 80s (does anyone remember the promises of the CASE tools?). We have seen many attempts at doing this, and all of them have run into a wall pretty quickly.

Oh, you can build a tool that gives you UI on top of a data store pretty easily. And you can go pretty far with it, but eventually your ability to point & click hit the limit, and you have to write code. And that is things totally breaks down.

LightSwitch is not yet publically available, so I have to rely on the presentation that Microsoft published. And I can tell you that I am filled with dread, based on what I have seen.

First of all, I strongly object to the following slide. Because I have the experience to know that working with a tool like that is akin to do back flips with a straightjacket on.

The capabilities of the tools that were shown in the presentation have strongly underwhelmed me in terms of newness, complexity or applicability.

Yeah, a meta data driven UI. Yeah, it can do validation on a phone number automatically (really, what happen with my Israeli based phone number?), etc. What is worse, even through the demo, I get the very strong feeling that the whole things is incredibly slow, you can see in the presentation multi second delays between screen repaints.

Then there are things like “it just works as a web app or windows app” which is another pipe dream that the industry has been chasing for a while. And the only piece of code that I have seen is this guy:

Which makes me want to break down and cry.

Do you know why? Because this is going to be the essence of a SELECT N+1 in any system, because this code is going to run once per each row in the grid. And when I can find bugs from watching a presentation, you know that there are going to be more issues.

So, just for fun sake, since I don’t have the bits and I can rely only on the presentation, I decided to make a list of all the things that are likely to be wrong with LightSwitch.

I’ll review it when it comes out, and if it does manage to do everything that it does and still be a tool usable by developers, I’ll have to eat crow (well, Raven :-) ), but I am not overly worried.

Here are a few areas where I am feeling certain things will not work right:

• Source control – how do I diff two versions of the app to see what changes? Are all changes diffable?
• Programmatic modifications:
• what happen when I want to write some code to do custom validation of property (for instance, calling a web service)?
• what happen when I want to put a custom control on the screen (for instance, a google maps widget)?
• Upsizing – when it gets to a 1,000 users and we need a full blown app, how hard it is to do?
• Performance – as I said, I think it is slow from the demo.
• Data access behavior – from what I have seen so far, I am willing to be that it hits its data store pretty heavily.

I fully recognize that there is a need for such a tool, make no mistake. And giving users the ability to do that is important. What I strongly object to is the notion that it would be useful for developers writing real apps, not forms over data. To put it simply, simple forms over data is a solved problem. There is a large number of tools out there to do that. From Access to Oracle Apex to FoxPro. Hell, most CRM solutions will give you just that.

My concern is that there seems to be an emphasis on that being useful for developers as well, and I strongly doubt that.