Bruce Gilham Jr.
Dead · retired with Visual Studio 2015

LightSwitch generated your app. The tooling to regenerate it is gone.

Where you are

Microsoft announced the end of Visual Studio LightSwitch in October 2016. The apps still run, on a Silverlight or HTML client over WCF RIA Services, but the tooling is gone, so nobody can change them. The only people who can make sense of the generated code are the ones who built with LightSwitch when it was alive.

How I get you off it

I built four production systems on LightSwitch, payroll, used-car wholesale, right-of-way appraisal and a food plant, and I have migrated off it. The data model and the business rules survive; the generated client is what gets replaced, screen by screen, on a stack you can hire for.

Other platforms

Dead · support ended October 2021

Silverlight has no runtime left. The exit is screen by screen, not a rewrite.

Dying · no new development since 2000

Classic ASP still runs. That is the problem.

Dying · VB6 IDE unsupported since 2008

The VB6 runtime survives on Windows. The developers do not.

Orphaned · the developers are retiring

Delphi is alive. Your Delphi 5 codebase is not.

Dead · support ended January 2015

FoxPro. Yes, still. The data comes out first.

Orphaned · HCL owns it; nobody is hiring for it

Your records are in Notes databases. Getting them out is the job.