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Hi,
I am kinda new to the whole integrating scene but what I want to know, is there a way one could embed a LightSwitch application creation suite inside an ASP.Net website. Any ideas or a lead would be greatly appreciated.
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First of all, the question, as it is, makes no sense at all. Lightswitch is nothing but a Visual Studio version, and Visual Studio is nothing but IDE. It does not build any projects, it provides the UI front-end for doing this work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightSwitch#Visual_Studio_LightSwitch_2012[^].

As all IDE, the Visual Studio application is interactive. It requires that someone would be able to hit all those keys, depending on what's presented on screen, and so on. Who do you think would do it on the server side? (Do you have to explain that ASP.NET is a server-side technology?)

However, it does not mean that the idea of such functionality makes no sense. You can really do different thing: you can create the Web application imitating Visual Studio. Actually, this is quite possible, and I don't even see any major technical problem. The only problem is that this would be a huge work, even greater work that the one done by the Visual Studio team. However, you could create highly scaled-down version. Come to think, you have everything to do that. First thing to understand is this: Visual Studio is absolutely not required for development, this is just a highly convenient tool. All the development can be done on bare (freely redistributable) .NET Framework. Of course, you can edit all files using some HTTP editor, even with syntax highlighting. But how to build? Everything comes with .NET Framework: MSBuild and two compilers: C# and VB.NET. You can use them in any .NET application (including ASP.NET application) via CodeDOM:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y2k85ax6.aspx[^].

That's all. Care to try? :-)

—SA
 
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09hadi 24-Sep-13 13:08pm    
Thankyou sir ........ your help is greatly appreciated. Will begin reading on CodeDom. What I currently require is to create an ASP.Net based IDE from which I can create an MIS limited to 4 tables only.
Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 24-Sep-13 13:18pm    
You are welcome.

I only would like to warn your about possibly great volume of UI work (and, most likely, nearly unsolvable problems with stepwise debugging, which is theoretically possible though). And you should not have any problems using CodeDOM in ASP.NET applications. Moreover, it could be even somewhat easier than in desktop applications where you cannot unload a loaded assembly without unloading a whole AppDomain. An ASP.NET application's lifetime is limited to a single HTTP request/response anyway, so this is not a problem.

Will you accept my answer formally now (green button)?

—SA
09hadi 24-Sep-13 13:29pm    
I for one would love to get my hands dirty in UI work. I have been craving for such an opportunity. Looking forward to your guidance when I run into any hard problems.... Cheers :D
Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 24-Sep-13 13:33pm    
Great.
Good luck, call again.
—SA

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