Setting up an integrated build and deploy pipeline for LightSwitch applications (part 2)
Introduction We continue in this article the deployment of a LightSwitch application from a build server. Basically, the approach can be used for any other web application type, so not only for LightSwitch applications. I have written already a whole…
A new RIA approach in LightSwitch: the ServerApplicationContext RIA Service.
Introduction Ria Services are in the LightSwitch community very popular. They are interesting because they allow me to reshape my data in a very elegant way. In this article I’ll introduce another way to use RIA Services based on the…
Flexible CSV exports over web-api with server side MEF – discover the export formats. (part 4)
Introduction Our previous post showed how we can consume an export by clicking a button. But let’s presume now that we want to present the user with a list of available export formats. Since we use MEF server side that’s…
Flexible CSV exports over web-api with server side MEF – the silverlight and html client. (part 3)
Introduction We want to consume now the MEF based export functionality from the silverlight client. Let’s first take a look at a potential screen where we use it: So, we have a bunch of customer (with orders) data and there…
Flexible CSV exports over web-api with server side MEF. (part 2)
Introduction In a previous post I introduced the usage of MEF (the managed extensibility framework) for making the management of the CSV exports more simple. The basic idea is to have an approach with which we can easily create a…
State driven security in LightSwitch (part 6): client side CanUpdate handling
Introduction In the previous post, we covered the most technical part in this series on state driven security: the server side logic for state driven can-update handling. To top it all, we still need a client side experience for this. That’s…
Flexible CSV exports over web-api with server side MEF. (part 1)
Introduction Since the introduction of LightSwitch V3, the amount of plumbing options we have in LightSwitch increased drastically. Especially when using it in combination with proven technologies like web-api and the new ServerApplicationContext in LightSwitch V3. Today, we’ll add another…
State driven security in LightSwitch (part 5): let the state dictate what you can update
Introduction We have so far a decent way to protect state transitions and a comfortable client side implementation. Now, we will cover another important facet of state driven security: the ability to update entities based on the current state. Why…
State driven security in LightSwitch (part 4): client side state transition convenience.
Introduction We have so far a security server side state transition implementation. Let’s take a look now how we can use this both in an Html client and a Silverlight Client. We’ll work step-by-step because that allows us to test…
State driven security in LightSwitch (part 3): server side state transition security
Introduction This post of mainly about the server side. We want to come up with a nice piece of base infrastructure with which we can protect server side the state transition of a certain entity. The base infrastructure should be…
State driven security in LightSwitch (part2): the big picture
Introduction Let’s try to summarize what we will cover in this series about state driven security. Let’s first answer the question “what is state” and try to come up with a potential approach to handle state driven security in LightSwitch….
State driven security (part1) in LightSwitch
Introduction Many line of business applications have a notion of workflow state where security aspects are key. The design and maintenance of such an application can become soon complex. Nonetheless, it’s perfectly doable (and maintainable) in LightSwitch. Given the importance…
Avoiding magic strings in LightSwitch (part 2): Getting strongly typed access to the LightSwitch choice lists
Introduction In the entity designer you can for a field specify a choice list. This will generate automatically a dropdown list when the entity is consumed in a screen. That’s cool, but we are missing one feature: strongly typed access…
Avoiding magic strings in LightSwitch (part 1)
Introduction The weakly-typed Api in LightSwitch (accessible via the Details class) complements magically the standard tool set and opens a wealth of things when you leave the path of simple on the outside and step into the richness of the…
Decently protecting entity fields which may be only updated by server side processing.
Introduction We have often fields in an entity definition which should only be updated byserver side processing. Think for example at audit fields. Sometimes developers make the mistake by thinking that if they don’t put these security critical fields on…
