LightSwitch is a new product from Microsoft that’s aimed at rapid application development. I’m trying the demo and it seems a useful tool.
Unfortunatly when the advertising says it works with all major databases they really mean all databases with SQL in their name, and there doesn’t seem to be any simple way to get it to talk to a Pick style database.
Has anyone found a way of doing this?
Unfortunately not – relational databases all follow very similar patterns and have a lowest common denominator that is easy to define so drag-n-drop tools such as Lighswitch can easily work with them.
Non-relational databases are a completely different ball of wax these days and are a bit trickier to write a generic drag-n-drop tool around. That said, in many cases one of the advantages of non-relational databases is you don’t need as much boilerplate translation code to take it from relational DB to object-oriented runtime environment.