Microsoft discontinues development of Visual Studio LightSwitch

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a simplified self-service development tool that enables you to build business applications quickly and easily for the desktop and cloud. It provides a simplified development environment so that you can concentrate on the business logic instead of the application infrastructure. Microsoft today announced that they are discontinuing the development of LightSwitch.

Our vision for LightSwitch was to accelerate the development of line-of-business apps, but the landscape has changed significantly from the time when we first thought about LightSwitch (think mobile and cloud for example). There are now more connected and relevant choices from Microsoft and our partners for business app development.

Visual Studio 2015 is the last release of Visual Studio that includes the LightSwitch tooling and as expected Microsoft will continue to support users with existing LightSwitch apps as per the Microsoft Support Lifecycle. Microsoft is no longer recommending LightSwitch for developing new apps, instead, they are pointing customers towards PowerApps. PowerApps is also a modern solution to build custom business applications that enables increased productivity with business apps that are easily created, shared and managed.