Letters From Readers -- Visual Studio Magazine

Letters From Readers

Readers share opinions on LightSwitch, Team Foundation Server and more.

09/01/2011

Andrew Brust offered his take on Visual Studio LightSwitch, a new line-of-business application development tool that breaks the mold of traditional dev platforms and frameworks, in his August column, "LightSwitch: The Answer to the Right Question." Readers shared their views on LightSwitch and its use of Silverlight.

I'm a longtime developer who has done everything from assembler to Web apps, and I must say I'm impressed by what I've seen of LightSwitch. I can see using it to rapidly bootstrap applications for my clients and then using a combination of its extension points to provide the customization they'll inevitably want. Quality of the result and rapid productivity are what my customers want, and I can see LightSwitch giving me a very big boost in delivering them. The other major thing I like about LightSwitch is that it may finally propel Silverlight into the mainstream of development where it belongs.

Bryan Morris

I want to use apps on my iPad. It's been a year -- why is Silverlight required?

Ted Newherd

In his July cover story, "Levels of TFS Build Automation," Benjamin Day showed readers how to take advantage of the latest build functionality in Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 using an incremental process that he dubbed "levels of build awesomeness."

This is by far the best article I've found after weeks of sorting through all the details available about TFS functionality. The practical, step-by-step approach makes the information provided easy to retain and take action on. Thank you!

Name Withheld

VSM Tools Editor Peter Vogel served up 17 free Visual Studio tools in "Visual Studio Toolapalooza" in June. Readers weighed in on their own choices for SMTP servers.

smtp4dev is unstable, in my opinion (and I read quite a lot of opinions similar to mine). This is an open source alternative: papercut.codeplex.com.

Name Withheld

I always love a good tool review. For SMTP, I've been using Free SMTP Server for testing and sending e-mail -- and yes, it actually sends the e-mail. I wish it had a log, but you do get to watch the program window reflect the operation. Sounds like this and papercut would be a good combination ...

Name Withheld

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