Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part–3)

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool for building data-driven Silverlight Application using Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a DataSource without writing any code. You can write a small amount of code also to meet your requirement.

In my previous chapter “Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part – 2)”, I described you how to create a search record window & export the records to Excel Sheet using Visual Studio LightSwitch for Silverlight. I also demonstrated about sorting and navigating records without writing a single line of code.

In this chapter, I will guide you step-by-step to create a DataGrid of records. Here you will know, how to insert/modify/delete records. These all steps are without writing any code. We will use just the tool to improve our existing application. Read more to Learn about it.

Background

If you are new to Visual Studio LightSwitch, I will first ask you to read the first two chapter of this tutorial, where I demonstrated it in detail. In my 2nd chapter, I discussed the following topics:

• Create the Search Screen
• See the Application in Action
• Customizing the Search Screen
• Sorting the Records
• Customize the Name of the Screen
• Navigation and Export to Excel

In this Chapter, we will discuss on the “Editable Data Grid” screen. Read it and learn more about this tool before it get release.

TOC and Article Summary

In this section, I will Summarize the whole Article. You can directly go to the original article to read the complete content.

• Create the Editable DataGrid Screen
  Here I demonstrated how to create the editable DataGrid Screen using Visual Studio LightSwitch. It has step-by-step process to create the screen.
• See the Application in Action
  Lets run the application to see the screen live, so that, we can do Add, Edit, Delete operations in the screen directly.
• Edit a Record
  Here is the 2 different ways to edit a record present in the DataGrid. One just editing inside the Grid and the another by clicking the Edit button present in the button panel.
• Create a New Record
  Here is the way to create a new record. Here also, I demonstrated it in two different approach. Read to know it more.
• Validate the Record
  Want to validate the Add or Edit operation? This point will help you. Wait, you don’t have to write a single piece of code. All are provided by the Tool itself.
• Delete a Record
  Worried about deleting a record? This point will guide you deleting any record from the DataGrid. I shown all the two approach there.
• Filter & Export Records
  These are the common feature provided by the tool. Let’s read them once again.
• Customizing Screen
  Customizing Screen is not different than the previous two chapters. I just pointed here the process once again.

Complete Article

The complete article has been hosted in SilverlightShow.net including the first part. You can read the them here:

• Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part – 1)
• Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part – 2)
• Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part – 3)

As usual, never forget to Vote for the article. Highly appreciate your feedbacks, suggestions and/or any comments about the article and future improvements.

End Note

You can see that, throughout the whole application I never wrote a single line of code. I never did write a single line of XAML code to create the UI. It is presented by the tool template automatically. It has a huge feature to do automatically. From the UI design to add, update, delete and even sort, filter all are done automatically by the framework.

I hope, you enjoyed this chapter of the series a lot. Lots of figures I used here, so that, you can understand each steps very easily. If you liked this article, please don’t forget to share your feedback here. Appreciate your feedback, comments, suggestion and vote.

I will soon post the next chapter. Till then enjoy reading my other articles published in my Blog and Silverlight Show. Cheers…