Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 is a simplified development tool intended to speed up the creation of custom business applications. It includes pre-built components, templates, and predefined data types for the most common business needs, and allows developers to produce form-driven applications for either desktop use or deployment to the cloud.
Last week Miguel de Icaza published a long post listing all the work the Mono team at Novell has been doing since the move to GitHub in July 2010. Much of the new work has been around language development and MonoDevelop improvements.
There is some confusion about when to use WPF and when to use Silverlight. Choosing the right technology for a project depends on precise requirements the application has and the differences between WPF and Silverlight’s capabilities.
Silverlight 4 was released back in April without essential development tools.Recently it was announced that Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is ready. In addition to basic Silverlight 4 support and templates for RIA Services, there are many IDE enhancements to make working with Silverlight, WPF, and XAML easier.
The Silverlight Toolkit has been an integral part of the Silverlight platform since it first appeared in 2008. Now on its seventh edition, support for Visual Studio 2008 and Silverlight 3 have been dropped in favor of recently released Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4.
Assemblies built in Silverlight 2 and 3 are not binary compatible with the .NET Framework, so if you want to share code you need generally need to dual-compile. With Siverlight 4 and .NET 4, you will be able to use some Silverlight-based assemblies from within .NET 4.
