Wiley Beginning Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Development
Contents
1. EXERCISES 1 Enumerate and explain a few challenges of LOB application development with regard to the human factor Explain what a wireframe is Explain what a proof of concept model is What is the fundamental principle of rapid application development RAD UU gt w N List a few methodologies that are based on the RAD principle P NOTE Answers to the Exercises can be found in the Appendix TOPIC Line of business LOB application Challenge of changing project environment Challenge of feedback frequency Wireframe Proof of concept model Rapid application development RAD Summary 17 WHAT YOU LEARNED IN THIS CHAPTER KEY CONCEPTS A LOB application participates in managing the business processes of an organization The environment of a project one with the duration of several weeks months or even years changes Project planning must be undertaken with possible changes legal political economic human technological and so on kept in mind Both developers and key users need feedback from each other during a LOB development project to mutually confirm that the right functionality is about to be implemented in the right way Finding the optimal frequency for this feedback is essential to the project s success A wireframe is a prototype that depicts the layout of the fundamental elements in the user interface Ul It emphasizes structure over graphical design A proof of concept2. they cannot truly appreciate how it will be implemented Conversely if you create a prototype of the activity such as an order process using a storyboard that represents the same UML diagram users will have a greater level of confidence that the final product will be the right one You can also use application prototyping to obtain required information from users in an indirect way If users are unable to clearly explain exactly what they want which is not uncommon you can create a prototype that implements an incomplete or even obviously inferior model When you present such a prototype to key users they can usually tell you what s wrong with it immediately or what s missing The rest of this section describes the various kinds of prototypes you can use Depending on your goals that is what you want to communicate you might use one or more on a single LOB project Wireframe Models The term wireframe has been used in three dimensional 3D modeling for a long time especially in 3D computer graphics This term is also used to describe Ul prototypes mainly for presenting website illustrations A wireframe in this context depicts the layout of the fundamental elements in the user interface Figure 1 1 shows an example of a wireframe describing the home page of a fictional company Application Prototyping 9 Logo amp Tagline lt This is the area where we put AcmeCompany s logo as well as the lt A simple sear
3. a software development process that emphasizes an iterative approach to the whole construction phase and handles prototypes as first class citizens of the implementation process RAD is not a single particular software development methodology Rather it is a generic name for concrete methodologies that primarily rely on iterations and prototypes in contrast to the traditional waterfall methodologies RAD has many flavors including generic agile software development methods as well as Scrum Extreme Programming XP Lean Software Development LD or Joint Application Development JAD NOTE This book does not cover individual software development methodologies so if you want more details about these RAD technologies use your search engine of choice to search online for more information 12 CHAPTER1 PROTOTYPING AND RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT The main strength of the RAD approach is that you can avoid a vast amount of rework in your software development projects Rework most often occurs in the following two cases gt You implement a piece of software in a wrong way or with poor quality In this case you must spend resources to fix development issues gt You implement a wrong piece of software not the one expected by its key users but something else In this case you must recreate the particular piece from the beginning Of course RAD and other agile software development methodologies do not prevent you from mak
4. are unsure how to carry out any of the tasks in your to do list then that is also a source of risk In situations where you know what you are expected to do but not how you do it you need to do some research A great method for performing this research is to use a prototyping technique called proof of concept modeling Instead of thinking and making plans about how to solve a specific issue you build a very simplified working model to prove the feasibility of your idea If that is usable you can use this model later of course with the necessary modifications This model is called proof of concept because it can either confirm that your hypothetical solution works or disprove its viability P NOTE Let s assume you need to implement rapid search functionality for 7 customers Instead of the traditional approach whereby users type a part of the customer name and click a button to retrieve a list of matching customers you need the capability to repeatedly reduce the number of matching names as users enter additional letters in the search box You may assume you can do this but you cannot be completely sure However building a simple proof of concept model may help you This precludes guessing whether you can meet this challenge and it provides the information you need to plan how you ll implement the final function Low Fidelity Prototypes In some situations you cannot avoid implementing parts of the growing application in or
5. the previous day In the afternoon you could present how you plan to address that feedback Later after implementing the desired feature s you could ease the initial frequency When you are about to prepare for a pilot deployment or the production deployment feedback frequency should again be increased APPLICATION PROTOTYPING There are many ways to manage the challenges mentioned previously and mitigate the risks associated with them The goal is to prevent risks that result from wrong information or insufficient information For example if an order management process is not entirely clear because you do not know the CRM system that stores customer information the lack of this information is a risk Similarly not knowing all the attributes that should be entered for a new order is also a risk Application prototyping is a tool for managing such situations and many challenges related to the human factor as well as mitigating associated risks While it is not the only tool it is one of the best Prototyping and the resulting application prototype is defined in various ways The essence of prototyping is the creation of a functional and perhaps somewhat limited model of the final application Unlike specification and design documents that use literal or formal descriptions this working model can be readily understood by key users For example try to explain a UML user activity diagram to key users Even if they understand it
6. PARTI An Introduction to Visual Studio LightSwitch CHAPTER 1 Prototyping and Rapid Application Development CHAPTER 2 Getting Started with Visual Studio LightSwitch CHAPTER 3 Technologies behind a LightSwitch Application CHAPTER 4 Customizing LightSwitch Applications d r Y 4 1 A j i A J Sint Sugg Sua ee one A A Ze isa ur 4 d 2 un 5 N wer ov Fr ur ile w e lt a or Shere x A a 4 A 1 k T Y T h 7 d J e j i i w d i er var WT w v ooe l tl A I i u d be x 2 A Al y AN 4 a y A a i i MM gt E Fa a MO e AS a E x a DE TE P 5 re ee gt Sa eee E Jeh a u o gt e n MA A CARAGA 0 ODOO0O0 00001 TER cl j 2 f g i sl de T i a E oa Prototyping and Rapid Application Development WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER gt Coping with the main challenges of line of business software development gt Understanding how application prototyping can help you cope with those challenges Understanding rapid application development and how it is related to Visual Studio LightSwitch Microsoft is known as a company delivering great development tools To create data centric applications for a long time Microsoft has been offering only two tools that target separate audiences gt Visual Studio is to be used by a wide range of developers from students and hobbyists to enterprise developers and architects gt Microsoft Access a part of the Office Plus
7. RAD was implemented a few years ago Visual Basic Visual Basic 1 0 released in May 1991 was the first RAD tool for the Windows platform For a long time Windows development was a field on which only C and C programmers could play The smallest Hello World program for Windows was about 100 lines of code whereas the statements to actually print out the Hello World text required only about a dozen lines Visual Basic 1 0 took the development community by storm and totally changed the programming model from code oriented development to Ul oriented development Whereas C and C programmers used resource files to describe the UI Visual Basic invented the concepts of forms controls and visual GUI construction The reusability and extensibility of forms and controls was a main design goal in Visual Basic Developers could create their own custom controls using generic or conversely application specific properties and methods From a developer s point of view Visual Basic was a real RAD tool Developers could drag components and controls from a toolbox onto the surface of forms and place them into the desired Rapid Application Development 13 position The behavior of controls could NEN SEES EEE ne be changed by setting up the properties of 514 218 ig rine DAADE TEL 3651005 Tas ange visual elements Forms and their controls had eta A A A a Rei o EEE ANT te Pra ijir ctl l mE EI events represent
8. and systems management services became standard parts of the IT infrastructure Today enterprise resource planning ERP and customer relationship management CRM systems are also part of the IT infrastructure in small and medium businesses Although many companies use almost the same IT infrastructure in terms of operating system database and communication platforms ERP CRM and so on they still work in different ways with those systems They all have some unique factors that differentiate them and their businesses from competitors on the same market segment To be unique in this sense they often need specific software tailored to their requirements and imaginations Because of these differences in how businesses use and think about their IT infrastructures they also need to consider what kind of software to develop to best support their specific business processes These management applications are often called line of business LOB applications or LOB software Line of Business Software Development Challenges 5 LOB Software Development There are many reasons why companies may need to develop LOB software including the following gt Tocreate an application that meets business needs not currently met by existing systems gt To develop satellite applications to support existing systems gt To establish an ergonomic user interface UI for a legacy system Traditionally software development projects involve team members an
9. bundle provides an easy to use approach to create data centric applications for users with very basic development skills With Visual Studio a wide range of applications can be created from the smallest console utilities to highly scalable web applications The price of this freedom and scalability is that developers must invest a relatively high amount of work to create their applications Although Visual Studio provides a number of productivity enhancement functions to create data centric applications using them requires advanced programming knowledge In contrast to Visual Studio Microsoft Access requires only basic development skills The simplicity of Access allows users without strong development backgrounds to create 4 CHAPTER 1 PROTOTYPING AND RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT their database tables forms and reports However the price of this simplicity is that Microsoft Access has strong architecture limitations it supports only monolith or traditional client server application architectures Creating a bit more complex user interface UI logic or data validation with Access than the default one requires advanced programming skills As a member of the Visual Studio family Visual Studio LightSwitch is a great new development tool Microsoft developed this product especially to support rapid application development RAD techniques in line of business LOB application development LightSwitch is the golden mean between the simp
10. ch box to tagline We need to choose a tagline that is brief enough and tells find the content within the visitor why this site is great gt o e this site gt eos ss see eesssssss e G eosssssssossossossenee Siar en a Se Ce PS A 00 00 2 0 a 02 02 00 222 5m 102 00 00 00 225 2 20 02 02 00 123 02 22 07 02 02 222 2 0 02 02 02 222 20 02 00 12 02 222 20 u 00 02 2 12 0 20 22 00 122 122 a 02 20 2 0 on 20 20 20 02 2 20 0 0 0 2 2 s Menubar e lt Uses the full width of the page with the following menus Products Store Support News Company gt Focus Area lt 4 5 pictures smooth animations changing cyclically Transfers the most important messages about the site to tell without words what AcmeCompany s website is about gt RADAR RNA NADAR AL ADIDAS AMADA NIDAD ADA ARIAS ADA NA Quick Start lt The three most important things the visitors want to use within this site Shop Sign up for Discount o Check New Products gt o Advertisements Page Footer lt Disclaimer copyright contact and other compulsory dances gt VP WHTTTTITITITITITITITITITITITITIITIIIIIIIIIIIIITITITrririirriirirririririiriiririririereeseeeseeefteeetel FIGURE 1 1 A wireframe example describing a home page Note the simplicity of this wireframe It does not contain a high level sophisticated design because its aim is not to present the graphical look of the home page but rather to enable key us
11. d stakeholders both from the business side and from the IT side Generally the business side is responsible for defining the business context and the issues tasks to be solved by the LOB application Also the business side undertakes managing user acceptance tests and related quality tests that validate the solution The IT side is generally responsible for implementation of the LOB application including system design infrastructure coding testing and deployment For some activities this division of labor is not so clear cut For example in some companies web design is controlled by business stakeholders while other companies delegate it to the IT side Developing LOB applications is a challenging task Some of these challenges arise from technical or functional complexity but the toughest ones reflect the different mindsets of the people involved In this chapter you will learn ways to meet many of these challenges IF NOTE It would be far beyond the scope of one chapter and indeed one 7 book to treat all of the LOB application development challenges This chapter addresses the most significant ones you are likely to experience when working within a LOB application development team representing either the business side or the IT side Changing Project Environment The traditional software development life cycle known as the waterfall model whereby the design implementation test and deployment phases fol
12. der to communicate how they work and what they do Wireframes can indicate the layout of a particular UI and proof of concept models implement a very simple and probably only technical aspect of the same UI If key users need more information to understand the solution you plan to provide them you may need to create working prototypes that can be used to demonstrate and test your ideas These working parts are not simple models but real applications In many cases you can create a low fidelity prototype that is sketchy and incomplete but represents the main characteristics of the target function For example suppose you are required to demonstrate an order entry function implemented as a four step process emulating the access to several back end systems You can create a low fidelity prototype that leads the user through this process Instead of just modeling the workflow the prototype really implements it but it omits parts that retrieve data from the CRM at the back end and write orders back in the ERP Rapid Application Development 11 Because this prototype focuses on the process you can create only a sketchy UI with a very basic design and a draft layout Moreover it does not have to deal with authentication business logic parameterization or any other things that are not closely related to the workflow High Fidelity Prototypes In some situations you must create a high fidelity prototype that provides much more detail abo
13. ed by methods with which PREE programmers could code the logic of the application a Visual Basic has evolved a lot since then Bas e but using current development tools such as Visual Studio you can recognize that the elements of the integrated development environment IDE still resemble those used in the old versions Figure 1 2 shows a screenshot from an old Visual Basic version running under Windows 95 Diedaudt Formi nane 4005 FIGURE 1 2 An old Visual Basic IDE running under Windows 95 Microsoft Access E Microsoft Access Microsoft Access 1 0 was released in EPA November 1992 It offered a relational database management system RDBMS for desktop applications combined with Customer Phore List Quarterly Orders Subferm Sales Analysis Sales by Year Dialog the Visual Basic programming language VBA which was included with the product to add code and create real applications for end users E Create formin Design view EH a graphical user interface GUI and great N crestetombyustomicard E i gt a Cebegories En visual tools Developers could easily design 7 a FE Eo database schemas enter data with simple PA EB customer Orders EB Product st i Reports Customer Orders Subformi EE Products forms and create reports They could use En aca a m m m Figure 1 3 shows the database window of the Northwind sample application in Microsoft Access 97 FIGURE 1 3 Micros
14. ers to focus on its structure and elements The colors used in this wireframe are just for separating layout segments visually they are not the real colors to be used in the final design You may be wondering why it is useful to create a wireframe instead of a model that more closely resembles the final state of the home page Wireframe models offer a few advantages over more detailed prototypes including the following gt They are relatively cheap to create Even a whiteboard can be used to create them Using wireframes you can save time and the expense of creating possible unsuitable UI models gt You can give a wireframe to key users and they will quickly have a basic understanding of your intention If something is wrong it can be corrected instantly gt When you present a graphically designed home page prototype to users their attention is focused on the style of the page the logo used the font type and so on instead of the structure of the page Of course later you must present them with the graphical design But first the structure should be grabbed 10 CHAPTER1 PROTOTYPING AND RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT gt A wireframe is also a good start for the final web design because it relays a lot of information about the intentions of key users that is useful to the experts who create the graphical design Proof of Concept Models For any project any piece of information you are lacking is a source of risk If you
15. hat developers could immediately drop onto the Designer surface In addition developers could easily create their own visual components and add them to the existing library NOTE At the time Visual Basic also provided a separate control development SDK that made it possible to create additional components called custom controls However Delphi offered a very intuitive and much faster way to develop controls because the IDE was designed with component reusability in mind Figure 1 4 shows the Delphi 7 IDE The largest part of the toolbar at the top of the IDE contains component category tabs and components Delphi 7 Projecti _ Ipa Blaeslee le Standard Additional Win32 Sustem Data Access Data Controls dbExoress DataSnap BDE ADO itle Gegar Mises Ze dag AOE Object TreeView E E El rae PageContiol Ef TabSheet TabShestl _ SS Grea Lise TLishview Properties Events item 1 Image Index jo State Index E FIGURE 1 4 Delphi 7 IDE Summary 15 Visual Studio LightSwitch and RAD Visual Studio LightSwitch is the newest member of the Visual Studio family Like Visual Basic Microsoft Access and Delphi it is a RAD tool but as its name suggests it aims to make the development of LOB applications as easy as flipping a switch Most RAD tools are development environments made for programmers and they provide productivity tools that enable the faster creation
16. ing poor quality or buggy software However they can help you mitigate the risk of constructing a wrong piece of software By building a prototype you can verify that you are building the right functionality according to the right quality expectations in other words the product your key users want While some rework may be required when you need to prepare a new prototype to replace a faulty one this rework still costs less than recreating from scratch a software module that is intended to be a final product In some situations the RAD approach of making prototypes does not add much value to your development process When your specification is very detailed and you do not have significant technology risks because you can handle them routinely you can start implementing final products instead of prototypes RAD Tools Today practically all development tools and environments support the RAD approach All tools promise to provide functions that help you to be agile and productive Some of them add new visual design features to enhance manual code writing Others use code libraries that dramatically reduce the length of source code Several tools use wizards that lead you through a complex process As technology evolves developers expect increasingly sophisticated features from a RAD tool While today the expectations are very high this has not always been the case The following sections look at a few tools that are good examples of how
17. licity of Access and the flexibility of Visual Studio With LightSwitch you can easily create data centric applications by simply designing data structure and the related UI To create your own data validation or UI logic requires writing only a few lines of code and most importantly you not need to have advanced programming skills Without any change in your application s structure you can deploy it either as a desktop application or a scalable web application in the cloud When you need to extend an existing LightSwitch application you can load it into the Professional Premium or Ultimate editions of Visual Studio 2010 and extend it with pretty complex business logic UI behavior or integrate it with your own back end systems Of course it requires advanced software development knowledge But you can use the existing LightSwitch application as a springboard and do not have to create a new one from scratch This chapter provides overview about application prototyping and RAD techniques Here you will learn how these techniques can answer LOB software development challenges and also understand how Visual Studio LightSwitch does it LINE OF BUSINESS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES Today most companies cannot survive without IT infrastructure supporting their operations For a long time infrastructure meant only hardware operating system and database management systems Later other services such as e mail collaboration platforms
18. low each other without overlapping does not work well in today s LOB application projects Any project that takes more than one day and most projects if not all belong in this category must meet the challenges of the continuously changing environment surrounding the project Accordingly the original requirements goals and at the end of the day application features change too These changes can be legal political economic technological human and so on LOB applications are similarly affected by such changes because the business environment also undergoes continual and often rapid change Creating a Requirements Specification New LOB applications or functional extensions of existing LOB systems generally begin their lives with a requirement specification This document summarizes all functional requirements 6 CHAPTER 1 PROTOTYPING AND RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT what the system is expected to do and all quality requirements performance service level UI robustness security and so on which form the basis for the detailed system specification or system design NOTE Many software development methodologies and frameworks do not use the term requirement specification However each has some artifact that outlines and describes what the sponsors and users want whatever that artifact is called What they share in common is the translation of a wish list into a detailed document or prioritized li
19. model is a working prototype that can be used to check the feasibility of an idea It focuses on the technical details to be checked without implementing other application details Rapid application development RAD is a software development methodology that uses minimal planning and rapid prototyping rather than thorough application design and waterfall like models
20. of applications Visual Basic and Delphi are definitely such tools Microsoft Access is a bit different in that it is not a generic development tool but rather is intended for creating database applications for the desktop Visual Studio LightSwitch is a RAD tool that makes data centric LOB application development available not only for developers but also for business analysts consultants and IT experts working on business projects As suggested earlier LightSwitch in the name of the new product symbolizes how easy it is to create LOB applications In contrast to RAD tools like Visual Studio or Delphi LightSwitch is designed to support prototyping with a minimal amount of coding or no coding at all Compared to the data centric RAD style offered by Microsoft Access which supports the traditional client server separation of application layers LightSwitch provides a clean and very sophisticated three tier application architecture and takes care of all the plumbing that binds the layers into a working application With Visual Studio LightSwitch you can create complete LOB applications as well as low fidelity or high fidelity application prototypes In the following three chapters you will learn about the fundamentals of LightSwitch and get a taste of this great tool Chapter 2 focuses on the first steps to getting started with the product while Chapter 3 treats the key technologies behind LightSwitch You have several ways to customi
21. oft Access form objects in the design environment Originally Access used its own database engine called Microsoft Jet Database Engine but after the release of version 2 0 it could use external database tables Microsoft Access 2000 allowed developers to work directly with SQL Server databases Access was and still is a great RAD tool It lowered the entry barrier to relational database programming While creating applications for most RDBMSs required a set of applications using several tools and programming languages with Access it was much simpler and quicker Delphi Delphi was originally developed by Borland and its first version was released in 1995 This tool had an IDE that was very similar to the Visual Basic IDE Delphi was designed to be a RAD tool that supported developing database applications including simple ones and even enterprise applications 14 CHAPTER1 PROTOTYPING AND RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT It used the Object Pascal language a successor of Turbo Pascal which provided full object oriented programming OOP capabilities in contrast to Visual Basic The product evolved very fast with five versions released in the first five years of its life Delphi was the first RAD tool capable of compiling 32 bit applications for Windows It became very popular among enterprise developers because of its RAD features It provided more than 100 components elements of the Delphi Visual Component Library t
22. st of required features as agreed upon by members ofthe project team Creating a clear requirements specification is an integral part of developing a LOB application If this specification fails to mirror the real world expectations and uses of the application to be implemented the result may be a poor or even useless system In some cases it may conform to the specification but key users won t like it Keep in mind that stakeholders from both sides of the aisle business and IT generally speak separate languages Whereas some people quickly grasp a few simple sentences others process information using screenshots and storyboards and still others prefer formal descriptions such as Universal Modeling Language UML use cases or activity diagrams NOTE Unified Modeling Language UML is a general purpose modeling language that uses a visual model to describe a system This model is built up from several types of diagrams that define the structure and the behavior ofthe system For example the use case diagram describes the functionality called use cases in UML ofthe system by means of how users called actors in UML interact with them UML was elaborated by James Rumbaugh Grady Booch and Ivar Jacobson It was standardized in 1997 by the Object Management Group OMG consortium and is still managed by this group Very often a requirements specification is presented to stakeholders as one long document and the stakeholders mu
23. st weed through numerous details to find the information they are seeking These documents typically use the language style of legal contracts and digesting them is extremely laborious The best requirements specifications are simple documents but they can be anything that unambiguously communicates to stakeholders the LOB system to be developed Line of Business Software Development Challenges 7 NOTE Not the range but the content of a requirement specification makes it useful or useless A good specification describes both functional requirements what functions the system has and quality requirements how the function should work by means of performance reliability user friendliness and so on Defining requirements with measurable expectations this function must retrieve the results in 2 seconds and using prioritization to separate critical functionality from nice to have also adds value to the specification Feedback Frequency While a LOB application is under development feedback from key users and business stakeholders about the burgeoning system is critical If users see the new system only at the very end of the implementation phase any issues or problems that are found can be time consuming and expensive to fix in some cases requiring expenditures that exceed the planned budget Conversely if key users want to see the new system s progress every day that can cause a lot of overhead for development and suppor
24. t P NOTE Problems found after the implementation phases of a project often reflect an ambiguous requirements specification and or false assumptions regarding the application s usability Finding the right balance for feedback frequency is a challenge whose solution will vary according to the project For some projects three days or a week might be fine whereas several weeks might be optimal for others For example while you are in the Ul design phase of the project having two feedback meetings in a week can help you to progress faster Later when you are about to elaborate specific business modules having a review meeting every two weeks could be enough NOTE Don t underestimate the importance of finding the right feedback frequency which can be a lifesaver Especially for long and complex projects using Visual Studio LightSwitch can significantly help you to communicate your ideas and understanding ofLOB application requirements as you will see after completing Part I of this book CHAPTER 1 PROTOTYPING AND RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT You can even vary how often you provide feedback to your users At the beginning during the conception phase or while designing the application it might be appropriate to communicate progress every few days In some cases you can even carry out a feedback cycle within one day For example in a morning meeting you might ask key users for feedback about a new screen issued
25. ut the intended functionality and serves as evidence that the functionality can be carried out in the outlined way Returning to the low fidelity order entry example you may be asked to demonstrate this function in more detail In this case your prototype should not only mimic accessing the back end systems but also use them to retrieve and check customers from the CRM and return the entered order to the queue of the ERP system In addition the sales department would like to ensure that the Ul of the workflow is intuitive and provides a great user experience In this case you could implement a high fidelity prototype that is very close to the final solution NOTE With the help of Visual Studio LightSwitch you can create both low fidelity and high fidelity models easily RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT Rapid application development RAD is a software development methodology that uses minimal planning and rapid prototyping rather than thorough application design and waterfall like models The planning of the software using the RAD approach is generally interleaved with the coding or implementation phase of the software This approach is very useful because it enables software to be developed much faster and makes it easier to accommodate the continuously changing project environment than waterfall like models do The term rapid application development was introduced in 1991 by James Martin who used it to describe
26. ze your prototypes built with LightSwitch as Chapter 4 demonstrates SUMMARY Writing LOB applications has many challenges mostly related to specifications and communication among the members of the development team Projects that cannot meet these challenges can easily fail One of the main development challenges is addressing the often unclear or unspoken expectations of key users Key users can rarely tell you their exact expectations either because they are unable to communicate exactly what kind of functionality they expect or they are unsure how to use a certain business function Prototyping that is developing a working model to test ideas and feasibility is a great technique to overcome these situations Depending on your particular scenario you can use several kinds of prototypes including wireframes low fidelity and high fidelity prototypes or proof of concept models to bridge the sea of missing information or clear communication between key users and the software construction team Most RAD tools including Visual Studio LightSwitch have robust features to support you in the creation of communicable prototypes 16 CHAPTER1 PROTOTYPING AND RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT In Chapter 2 you ll extend your knowledge about the role of LightSwitch among the members of the Visual Studio family You will learn both how to install LightSwitch and how to create your first application without writing any lines of code
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