LightSwitch Update

[Announced October 14, 2016] 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, for example with the prevalence of mobile and cloud solutions. There are now more connected and relevant choices from Microsoft and our partners for business app development.

We no longer recommend LightSwitch for your new apps. But we remain committed to fulfilling our vision to significantly raise the productivity bar for building modern LOB applications, which is why Microsoft is aligning efforts behind PowerApps. Microsoft PowerApps is a solution to build custom business applications that enables increased productivity with business apps that are easily created, shared and managed. PowerApps offers a modern, intuitive experience for LOB application development. Learn more about PowerApps.

Visual Studio 2015 is the last release of Visual Studio that includes the LightSwitch tooling. We recommend users not begin new application development with LightSwitch. That said, we will continue to support users with existing LightSwitch applications, including critical bug fixes and security issues as per the Microsoft Support Lifecycle. For reference, the mainstream support phase for Visual Studio 2015 continues until 13 October 2020. Read more about mainstream support.