Visual Studio LightSwitch requires SharePoint 2010 or higher, primarily because of OData support. All communication between a LightSwitch app and SharePoint uses a list. Whenever you add an external data source to your LightSwitch application and choose SharePoint, you’ll be presented with a dialog containing all available Lists on the site. Figure 1-9 shows an example of the lists you will find on a typical SharePoint site.

There is one list automatically selected by default, named UserInformationList. This list contains information about all users known to the SharePoint site. It is selected by default since virtually every other list links to it in some way. Access to any list is controlled by SharePoint permissions. You will need to have site administrator privileges if you want to modify the UserInformationList. Not having the appropriate permissions will result in read-only fields when Visual Studio LightSwitch creates a screen from the SharePoint list. In some cases, this could be the behavior you want if you simply need to present information to the user without allowing any changes to be made.