Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 is a simplified, self-service development tool that enables you to create business applications quickly and easily for the desktop and cloud. I first announced LightSwitch at the VS Live conference in August 2010 and have since written a few posts including detailed tutorials. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it starts with the premise that most business applications consist of data and the screens that users interact with. LightSwitch simplifies attaching to data with data source wizards or creating data tables with table designers. It also includes screen templates for common tasks so you can create clean interfaces for your applications without being a designer. Basic applications can be written without a line of code. However, you can add custom code that is specific to your business problem without having to worry about setting up classes and methods.

As part of today's announcement, I've put together a video that highlights some of the features within LightSwitch, along with sessions on how to build applications using it.