As my regular reader will know, when Lightswitch came out, I was quickly hooked. Like many people, I saw an answer to the hassle of creating n-tier desktop applications. It was a dream. Development time was slashed, and the few annoyances that there were paled into insignificance compared to the speed of development, and the quality of the end product.
I dived in head-first, and quickly came up against some of the limitations of a first version. That’s not a criticism, it’s more a testimony to the amazing power the first version had, that we could produce real LOB applications, and were frustrated by the missing bits.
Thankfully, Microsoft did a sterling job of adding extensibility points to Lightswitch, and despite the poor documentation (an ongoing feature of Lightswitch that caused a lot of wasted hours), the potential was there to fill in the gaps.
Inspired by early experimenters, like Yann Duran’s excellent Luminous Controls (which I still use in every Lightswitch project), I had a go at producing a custom control for Lightswitch, more for the fun of tinkering than anything else. Having worked out how to get going, I added a few more controls, until the first version of the Pixata Custom Controls For Lightswitch was born. Feeling that I had something that might be of use to others, I added it to the Visual Studio Gallery, and posting about it in the (now extinct) forum. I got so excited when it had 100 downloads!
Spurred on by the great feedback, I added more controls, and the control suite hit the top three for Lightswitch extensions. It varied between the first, second and third places, but has always been in the top three. To date, it’s had over 25,000 downloads, despite that the fact that I haven’t updated the controls for over a year.
Roll on a few years, and the mobile market exploded. Smartphones and tablets gained more power, and were able to browse the web almost as well as their desktop cousins. However, probably due to political more than technical reasons, the manufacturers chose not to support Flash or Silverlight on these devices, leaving Lightswitch out in the cold.
Microsoft, fairly understandably, decided to concentrate their efforts on producing a version of Lightswitch that would support mobile devices. That’s where the HTML client came in.
This was fine, except for two huge problems…
1) The HTML client was (and still is from what I can see) woefully short of being ready for the job. It’s a good start, but not good enough to create LOB applications. Specifically, despite the massive growth of the mobile market, Microsoft seem to have forgotten that the desktop world still exists, and still accounts of a very significant number of users, especially in the business world. Until the HTML client supports the desktop, it can’t be considered ready for serious use.
I have other misgivings about the HTML client, but they are minor in comparison to this one. I know the mobile market is important, but in business-to-business work, which is a significant part of the software development world, you just can’t afford to ignore the desktop.
2) Whilst I don’t think we can criticise Microsoft for moving away from Silverlight, which must have been hard for them, having put so much effort into producing a first-class product, what is totally unforgiveable (in my opinion at least, and I know I’m not alone) is the way they just dumped the Silverlight developers without any support. Their support for the more advanced side of Lightswitch was always poor, but when the HTML client came along, Silverlight client developers were just ignored completely. The extensibility forum died a sudden death, with unanswered questions making up the sum total of all posts.
Now, before I get criticised for this, I understand that they have limited resources, and want to concentrate their efforts on the latest and greatest, but many, many developers sunk a large amount of time and energy into Silverlight-related development, and to have all support cut off in an instant was a really dirty trick. I think we can all understand why they don’t want to invest more time in active development, but at least support what’s already there.
The problem became more acute as time went on, and Microsoft were pushing the HTML client with an evangelical fervour. It got to the stage where I knew that if I had a problem, there was little point in posting in a forum, as my post would be swallowed in a sea of HTML-related questions, and wouldn’t be answered by anyone at Microsoft anyway. The only way I could get an support was peer-to-peer support from some of the Lightswitch rock stars.
It came to a head for me recently when, having invested a significant amount of time in developing a complex application, it suddenly stopped working. The only clue I had was the rather generic error message “Cannot communicate with the database” when the application started. It worked fine on my development machine, and the database connections were all correct (I could even change the connection strings in Visual Studio, and run the application against the remote production database, so I know that wasn’t the problem), but the deployed version refused to work.
After struggling to get the attention of any Microsoft support person, I eventually had to give up and rewrite the entire application in WPF and ASP.NET WebAPI2. Surprisingly, it didn’t actually take that long, and left me wondering if Lightswitch is really as RAD as I had thought, once you get away from the basic functionality.
So, I’m left with a sour taste in my mouth, and some deployed Lightswitch applications that I’m terrified to touch, in case they mysteriously stop working as well. I can’t afford to rewrite them from scratch, and know that there is no way I’ll get any support if they stop working. I’m just hoping the customers don’t want any changes.
Sad end to a promising product. I have little interest in investigating the HTML client, as ASP.NET MVC makes it so easy to produce high-quality web sites that work in both desktop and mobile environments, and I can’t see any benefits in Lightswitch for this.
As for the controls? Well, I’ve made them open source, so if anyone wants to develop them further, they can.
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