Another way to expand the capabilities of Visual Studio LightSwitch is through the use of Silverlight Controls. The only downside here is that you’ll need a full version of Visual Studio Professional with SP1installed in order to take advantage of this feature. Microsoft does offer several ways to try out Visual Studio without actually purchasing the product, including a 30-day trial version (http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/try).

That being said, I’m going to show you how to build an app that uses a Silverlight Chart control to show task completion in a bar graph.

For this sample, you’ll need to download and install the Silverlight 4.0 toolkit. You’ll find it on the Microsoft Code project site (http://silverlight.codeplex.com). The basis of this example will be a LightSwitch project attached to the demo SharePoint site and the Tasks list. We’ll also need a parameterized query to return all tasks by username.