The LightSwitch Application Lifecycle

If you've worked with .NET in the past, you may be curious as to how everything ties together in LightSwitch. This section describes the lifecycle of a LightSwitch application. Specifically, it explains what happens during the design, build, and runtime stages.

Figure 1-10. LightSwitch build and run process

Figure 1-10 illustrates the LightSwitch development process in the form of a diagram. The columns in the diagram show the client, server, and common logic parts of your application. The common logic is executed on both the client and server. You'll see in Chapter 2 how LightSwitch creates a .NET project called Common that contains this logic

To make sense of this diagram, we'll start off at the bottom. This section represents the tasks that are carried out in the LightSwitch designer. As mentioned earlier, LightSwitch applications are constructed using building blocks. When you add screens, tables, or data sources using the designer, the XML mark-up that represents these building blocks are added to your ApplicationData.lsml file. The bottom section of Figure 1-10 highlights how: