Tag: Product Management

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 is Available Now

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One of the exciting parts of being a Visual Studio Product Manager is getting to play with new technologies and then bringing them to market.  Today it was announced that LightSwitch is available for download and purchase.  It has been a fun ride since the first beta was announced almost a year ago and I am excited to see developers of all skill levels get it in their hands.  If you are itching to get it now go to: http://www.microsoft.com/lightswitch to download the trial.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, LightSwitch is a simplified self-service development tool that enables you to create business applications with minimal effort.  Developing useful applications can be done with designers and if customization is needed, often just a few lines of code or extensions are sufficient.  LightSwitch users are often more interested in the end product than the coding so getting to a solution quickly is important.  However, the LightSwitch application is flexible enough to use extensions or re-target the deployment environment (desktop, web or cloud) often without having to redesign the code.

Or to sum it up more concisely it addresses the development of business application equation:

Data + Screens = Business Applications

Learn More

To mark the occasion we recorded Jason Zander’s (Corporate Vice-President, Visual Studio) overview of the product and then a series of sessions on how to use it.  Of the eight sessions I am in two of them which I have links to below.

Understanding the Visual Studio LightSwitch Architecture

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch/advanced-videos/understanding-lightswitch-architecture

Deploying Your Application to the Cloud

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch/advanced-videos/cloud-application-deployment

Give LightSwitch a try and let me know what you think either through the forums or my blog.

Talk to you soon,

Orville | Twitter: @orville_m

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New Beginnings… Start of My Next Pursuit

Originally posted: 3/5/2010 at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/orville/archive/2010/03/05/new-beginnings-start-of-my-next-pursuit.aspx

It is common to write a “Hello World” application when starting on a new platform. This is my first MSDN blog post so I would like to start by saying “Hello MSDN” and to thank you for taking the time to read my post. I hope you will find my posts useful and feel free to send me comments.

So here are a few things about me to start the conversation:

1. Spent most of my career as a program manager working on web services, most recently Windows Live ID. It was amazing to work on web services that impact people all over the world.

2. In delivering web services to the world I still had a yearning for driving businesses forward. So I decided to pursue a career change and go into product management.

3. I’m a technical product manager in Visual Studio focused on both Windows Phone 7 and Web development.

4. Outside of work I am a MBA student at the University of Washington focused on marketing and finance.

Over the past few months that I have been here I’ve been playing with the phone tools and I can’t wait for Mix so everyone else can see them. My blog posts will focus on technology, business, product management and other random musings as they arise. J There will be lots of fun tidbits about announcements, technology, etc.

Talk to you soon,

Orville