Microsoft has officially announced the end of development of LightSwitch, a rapid application builder for desktop and mobile applications.

LightSwitch was introduced in July 2011 as a tool to build multi-tier applications using a data-first approach. You can design you database using an excellent visual designer, design screens for viewing and editing the data using a non-visual designer, and generate applications with the server-side code hosted either on your own server or on Microsoft Azure. The client application in the original LightSwitch was based on Silverlight, but this was later extended with an option for HTML. You can get a feel for the general approach from my early hands-on here.

As I noted at the time, LightSwitch abstracts a number of difficult tasks. This is a good thing, though as with any application generated you had to take time to learn its quirks. That said, it is more usable than most model-driven development tools, in my experience.

LightSwitch had some bad luck. It was conceived at a time when Silverlight looked like the future of Microsoft’s client development platform, but by the time it launched Silverlight was heading for obsolescence. It also fell victim to ideologies within Microsoft (which persist today) that chase the dream of code-free application development that anyone can do. The documentation for LightSwitch on launch was dreadful, a series of how-tos that neglected to explain how the tool worked. You had to get the software development kit, aimed at those building LightSwitch components, to have any hope of understanding the tool.

The abandonment of LightSwitch is not a surprise. Microsoft had stopped talking about it and adoption was poor. There will be no tooling for it in the next Visual Studio, though you can keep using it for a while if you want.

I think it is a shame since it is a promising tool and I cannot help thinking that with more intelligent positioning and a few tweaks to the product and its documentation it could have been a success. Those who did get to grips with it found it very good.

What is unfortunate is that Microsoft has lost the faith of many developers thanks to the many shifts in its development strategy. I know component vendors have also been caught out by the Silverlight and then LightSwitch debacle. Here is one of the comments on the announcement:

Microsoft keeps doing this over and over, we invest months even years to master a technology, just to find out it’s being phased out prematurely. Perfectly good, one-of-a-kind niche tools too. So much investment on both sides (both MS and customers) down the drain. What’s worse, it is done is a non-transparent, dishonest manner, letting things dry up over a couple years so that when the announcement comes, no-one really cares any more, no more noise – just look at this blog.

This makes it hard for the company to convince developers that its new strategies de jour have a longer life ahead of them. I am thinking of the UWP (Universal Windows Platform), which has already changed substantially since its first conception, and of PowerApps, the supposed replacement for LightSwitch, and yet another attempt to promote code-free development.

Developers do not want code-free development. They like tools that do stuff for them, if they are intuitive and transparent, but they also like an easy route to adding and modifying code in order to have the application work the way they want.