Microsoft announced recently that Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 will be released on July 26. I’ve been watching the development of this product with keen interest for the last year or so. I’m looking forward to evaluating it more in-depth soon.

Building common line-of-business (LOB) applications in today’s enterprise development stacks can be too complex and too costly for today’s tight budgets. For this reason alone there are “literally millions” (exaggeration license: 02389-872.159-034) of LOB applications being created by non-programmer Office users. These “applications” most often get pushed around in Excel via Exchange. Many live in a hastily created Access database and shared clumsily and un-securely on a workgroup file server.

Still others are somewhat more sophisticated and are hosted on products such as QuickBase from Intuit. This latter category resolves many of the problems inherent in the emailed Excel spreadsheet and the Access fileshare such as security, reliability, common user interface, ease of use, etc. There are many more specialized web-based SaaS offerings that solve specific business problems. One notable vendor who led the way in this area is 37 signals.

But these solutions are not always enough to meet the needs of the business. There is a gap between these “entry-level” (ELOB) applications and what I will call primary line-of-business (PLOB) applications. The PLOB is a custom developed, sophisticated enterprise application with complex business rules, sometimes even more complex user interfaces, and far more complex data and integration requirements, upon which the business relies for its core service offering or mission critical systems.

Somewhere between ELOB and PLOB there has to be a middle ground. Let’s call it the mid-line-of-business (MLOB) application (FLA creator license: FOLK-LANG-MAKE-UPPR-WXYZ). There are plenty of “app generator” and scaffolding tools that claim to live in the MLOB space. I’ve never been too impressed with them. They always seem to lose their way in convention, diverging from business requirements too greatly to meet business needs.

So I am hopeful that LightSwitch will fill the MLOB gap. We’ll see. Time will tell. In any case, it should at least be fun to find out.