At VSLive today and within his blog, Jason Zander of Microsoft announced one of the most closely guarded development projects from Microsoft — Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch. This was announced as “the simplest way to build business applications for the desktop and the cloud.”
Dubbed with the codename “KittyHawk” this project has been in the works for quite a while at Microsoft.
LightSwitch is a project that should make people think of Visual Basic in the early days. Visual Basic originally made building applications easier. In similar ways, LightSwitch makes it easier to build solutions. Using pre-built templates and other tools, development for many standard applications targeting windows clients or Windows Azure should be quicker and easier. Additionally, LightSwitch can build Silverlight applications that run both in or out of the browser.
The beta for Visual Studio LightSwitch will be available for download on August 23rd. You should be able to find it on the LightSwitch site when it is made available.