CLASS Extensions. Making of (the origins)

Did you know that the main reason I created CLASS Extensions was to make my life easier?
I had initially discarded LightSwitch from my deck of choices. At first glance (early Beta 1) I had misjudged it as poor relative of application builders that I hate altogether.
It was after watching Beth Massi’ s presentation in Tech-Ed USA 2011 regarding extensibility that made me take a second good look at it. And then…then it was love at second sight.
Although extensibility was what made me love LS, it took me quite some time to decide to write my own extension. I had custom controls I was using (the Color business type and editors is an example) and referenced libraries for a long time as I was really intimidated by the idea of creating an extension of my own. And it was only after the official release of Visual Studio LightSwitch that I even thought of doing it, as the Cookbook  and blank template approach was, to say the least, discouraging, at least for me. I knew I wasn’t the intended audience.
When I started the development of the first application, I knew I had to write the extensions. Using the custom controls required so much duplication of logic mostly and code and was so restricting (as to how to name the members of the screens etc.) that made it unattainable to use them.
Just reading the How to articles on extensibility it was obvious the path to follow was there but many things were to be discovered and solve down that path, the hard way. I mean, it’s not the most complete and well structured documentation, but a wealth of information is provided.
“Be a man” I said to myself and created my first extensibility project. Took me a lot of effort to even have this, preliminary in terms of quality and completeness, version released. But, as I said in the previous post, as soon as I replaced the first custom control with the respective extension control I knew it was all worth it…

CLASS Extensions. Making of (Introduction)

Did you know that even for a simple extension there are numerous things the developer has to take into account?
I didn’t know it either until I decided to pack a few of the custom Silverlight controls and accompanying classes (like value converters) in CLASS Extensions. Many details, from very simple like setting the image of the control to be displayed in the LightSwitch designer, to more complex like automatically using one control for collections (like in a grid) and another for details and setting default settings. I must say here that if it weren’t for the community and all the members being more than willing to help, it would have been impossible to manage (what I have managed anyway, as this first attempt is far from complete).
It was the first time in my developer live I felt I really needed two screens. One for reading the proper LightSwitch extensibility How to article and one for the Visual Studio IDE to write code and XML. From these articles I managed to finally solve many of the issues reported in version 1.0 and will be included in the next version.
At the end of the day, I have to say that it was worth all the effort. Using extensions instead of custom controls and referenced libraries I had written and been using, is so much more productive that any time spent was paid back in just a few screens’ design time.
So, if you are hesitating to go through the process of learning how to write extensions, all I have to say is go for it! And this is a good tip…
P.S. In upcoming posts I will talk  about the details of the implementation that i believe is worth sharing.

Learn

Did you know you can find LightSwitch self-training resources in places like:
LightSwitch Team Blog
LightSwitch Developer Center
LightSwitch Help Website
Open Light Group
LightSwitch Central
And here you can find a list of many, many more LightSwitch related links.
One thing is for sure, LightSwitch is worth learning