Step 1: Create a LightSwitch Project
For your first project, you'll create an application for managing contact information. As your first step, you'll open Visual Studio and create a project.
Create a Project
To create a project for your application
On the Start menu, choose Visual Studio.
On the menu bar, choose File, New, Project.
The New Project dialog box opens.
In the list of templates, expand the Visual Basic or Visual C# node, choose the LightSwitch node, and then choose the LightSwitch HTML Application template.
In the Name text box, enter My First Application, and then choose the OK button.
The Start window appears, and the necessary folders for your project are added to the Solution Explorer window, as the following illustration shows:
.png "My First Application project")
Closer Look
You just created a project for a contact management application so that you can store and organize the pieces of that application.
The New Project dialog box in step 2 includes templates for several types of projects. Your contact management application will be an HTML-based application that’s optimized for display on mobile devices. You could also create a Silverlight-based desktop application that’s optimized for data entry by choosing the LightSwitch Desktop Application template. No matter which template you start with, you can mix the application types – in fact, you’ll add Silverlight user management screens later in this tutorial.
When you created the project, you chose either Visual Basic or Visual C# as the programming language, but both languages have the same capabilities. You can choose whichever language you prefer when you create a project, but you can't change that decision later.
In most cases, you'll want to enter a more meaningful name for the project in the New Project dialog box. You can also change where the project files are saved when you create the project.
Next Steps
In the next lesson, you'll learn how to define the data for your application by creating a data entity.
Next lesson: Step 2: Define the Data in LightSwitch
See Also
Tasks
How to: Create, Open, Save, or Delete a LightSwitch Project