The day 1 keynote at Visual Studio Live in Chicago is titled “Visual Studio, .NET and the Cloud” and was delivered by Jay Schmelzer (Director of Program Management for the Visual Studio Team at Microsoft). Heavy emphasis was put on development with Visual Studio Lightswitch, Sharepoint and Office 365.

Visual Studio Lightswitch is an interesting solution for those plain vanilla business applications that really don’t benefit from a fully custom approach. Why reinvent the wheel by constantly writing the same old validation code for things like phone and social security numbers?

At the same time the developer community seems to be almost universally skeptic as to whether it is actually a good idea. There are a number of reasons for this. Some developers are dismissive of the notion that we will ever be able to create complex business applications without writing code. Yet others object to the notion that non-technical people will be able to use the tool. It may not be development but is still quite complex.

Regardless of the possible objections I think this is an interesting option which might become popular for those business applications that don’t really need to follow a custom design or have much in the way of really complex business logic.

In short, even though the idea of developing in Visual Studio Lightswitch doesn’t exactly fill me with warm and fuzzy feelings, I do see a business case here. If you have a different opinion please don’t hesitate to comment.