Lighting up the CommuterAPI with LightSwitch

Heavily Caffeinated - OData Apps in LightSwitch, Part 3

"Welcome back! In this post we are going to wrap up the OData application we started back in Part 1 and continued in Part 2.

To refresh everyone on how we got here, we started with the idea that we would use some new features in LightSwitch for Visual Studio 11 (Beta) that would allow us to attach to an OData service. Specifically we are attaching to the Commuter API OData service.

We wanted to solve 4 basic problems:

1. Where is my stop? (we solved this in Part 1 and 2 with a Bing maps extension)
2. When is my train arriving? (we solved this in Part 1)
3. How do I get there? (we solved this in Part 1 and 2 with Route information and maps)
4. How many escalators will be broken today? (we saved this problem for Part 3)

To find a solution to this last problem we are going to pull in data from the “Incidents” entity in the OData service. This entity contains all the information regarding broken escalators and things of that nature.

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I had blogged about the Commuter API here, OData your Transit (Think CommuterAPI OData'ified), so this caught my eye. Also I've been watch the LightSwitch OData news and have to say that that might be its killer feature. Being able to easily knock out a nice, usable front end to an OData source (and/or to mashup an number of them) looks pretty neat.

Now what I'd like to see is if LightSwitch can grow beyond a desktop app (well in 11 there's a server side, but that's not what I mean), to provide Metro/WP7 UI's. Given the separation of concerns that's the bedrock of LightSwitch, I believe it might be possible (not easy, but I think still possible). We'll see. It's SilverLight story is at its last chapter, in vNext (12) I wonder what we'll see for the UI side, assuming it lives that long...

 

Related Past Post XRef:
OData your Transit (Think CommuterAPI OData'ified)