My blood froze when I discovered the existence of the book SharePoint Apps with LightSwitch. I have nothing against the author, the book or the style in which it’s written; my revulsion has to do with the three technologies mentioned in the title and subtitle:
- SharePoint: A collection of half-baked web-based tools designed by people who neither like nor “get” the web. However, purchase decision-makers at enterprises and government organizations eat it up, and it’s an unkillable cash cow at Microsoft.
- Lightswitch: An attempt to bring back the spirit of the old Visual Basic — make the easy tasks easier and the hard tasks possible — but it’s aimed at the wrong market, does the wrong things and is likely to be yet another Microsoft tool to die from neglect (DLR languages like IronPython and IronRuby), product team turf wars (like LINQ) or the world passing it by (like Silverlight). Should probably be free, but sells for $300.
- VB.NET: Take a nice language like C# and weigh it down with syntax that’s reminiscent of VB. It’s like saying “Hey, I want a little more Italian culture in my life. From now on, I’m doing using only Roman numerals!”
I’d hate to work on a project that used all three together. To me, it sounds like the software version of The Human Centipede.
