I’m a hardcore coder who is into design patterns and best practices. But sometimes, you just need to crank out a simple little application for someone to manage a database of employees or orders… maybe both! Recently, some of use have turned to ASP.NET Dynamic Data for scaling websites, but websites aren’t always the best solution. What if your client really wants a desktop application with rich functionality like exporting to Excel? Introducing the next wave of application scaling: LightSwitch!

As I said, I’m really into patterns and practices. I wouldn’t use this to design an enterprise architecture, and it wasn’t meant for that. However, LightSwitch is really great at plugging into an existing enterprise infrastructure and generating a useful application. As I watched the demo (keynote from VSLive and parts available at the website), I noticed three sources of data you could choose from: SQL Server, SharePoint, and RIA Services. If you’re building a standalone application, you can design your tables from scratch as well.

After you select your data, you select an option to generate views from your data. It is quite a simple design experience, and when you’re done you have a fully functional application with full data validation. Since it’s built on Silverlight, it even looks good! There are even extensibility points if you need to add custom code (only VB or C# at this time).

I sometimes get requests to write little applications to access data sources in a different manner than the primary applications. With LightSwitch, I know I will be able to do so quickly and get back to more interesting challenges. The beta will be available on the website on August 23rd.