New to LightSpeed? New members joining your team and want them to up skill? Look no further than our updated “Getting started with LightSpeed” screencast.

This screencast is designed to help new users understand how they can install LightSpeed and then be working with their data and LightSpeed entities in ~10 minutes. If you’re an experienced LightSpeed user then there won’t be much to gain from this screencast but perhaps it will be helpful to share with those less experienced. You may also prefer some of our other screencasts :-)

In approximately 10 minutes you learn:

• How to create a new LightSpeed model
• How to configure a LightSpeedContext
• How to set up and use a strongly typed Unit Of Work
• How to undertake the 4 CRUD operations
• Bonus learning: That LightSpeed is the best choice for starting a project fast! :-)

The focus of LightSpeed has always been to get out of the way and let the developer actually get work done and we hope this video shows that.

We (and by “we” I mean “I” here ;) go through phases of putting together screencasts. If you have something you would like to see explained in true video glory then please drop a comment on this post and I’ll see what I can do. Suggestions do not have to be limited to our LightSpeed product – it can be for any of our products.

I hope that helps!

I have just published a new screencast showing how to quick and easily create a dynamic data website that sits over a LightSpeed domain model. LightSpeed has been able to work with Dynamic Data for some time now but hopefully this screencast will help those who have not been aware that this could be done.

Topics covered:

• LightSpeed enabling a Dynamic Data website
• Improving the display of associated entities in display lists
• Passing LightSpeed entity validation to Dynamic Data’s validation capabilities to improve the editing & creation process in Dynamic Data (This is a new feature a

What is dynamic data?

The official Microsoft description is “ASP.NET Dynamic Data provides a framework that enables you to quickly build a functional data-driven application, based on a LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework data model. It also adds great flexibility and functionality to the DetailsView, FormView, GridView, and ListView controls in the form of smart validation and the ability to easily change the display of these controls using templates.”

Of course now you don’t need to shackle yourself to L2S or L2E just to use Dynamic Data – you can work with your existing LightSpeed models :-) Watch the dynamic data screencast here (a direct download is also available if you do not like to watch flash videos in your browser)

I hope that helps!

Yet another how-to screencast on working with LightSpeed, we have just published “Views with LightSpeed”.

LightSpeed has always supported working with Views however with LightSpeed 2.2 we have added many enhancements to make them easier to work with. This video helps explore what new additions have been made to improve the developer experience when working with views.

With this screencast you will learn:

• How to easily work with views in the LightSpeed Visual Studio Designer
• How to query against views – both with the generated IQueryable and the LightSpeed classic query API
• How to deal with views that are projections of tables rather than matching existing entities
• How to with views that return projections that do not match existing entities
• When having an updatable view would be useful.

Click here to watch how to use Views with LightSpeed.

We added improved view support to LightSpeed for version 2.2 (and in the nightly builds following 2.1). Grab a copy of the latest build of LightSpeed that includes this support here.

Any feedback – either on the view support of on the screencast itself, is greatly appreciated. Drop a comment on this post.

In our ongoing series of screencasts, we now have a guide to working with Stored Procedures with LightSpeed.

With this screencast you will learn:

• How to easily work with stored procedures with the LightSpeed Visual Studio Designer
• How to work with custom parameters to your stored procedures (as OUT or REF parameters for example)
• How to write your own ProcedureQuery’s if you don’t wish to use the designer
• How to work with ProcedureParameter’s
• Some tips and tricks when working with stored procedures that return projections that do not match existing entities

Click here to watch how to use Stored Procedures with LightSpeed.

We added Stored Procedure support to LightSpeed for version 2.2 (and in the nightly builds following 2.1) and supports working with stored procedures in SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL. Grab a copy of the latest build of LightSpeed that includes this support here.

Any feedback – either on the stored procedure support of on the screencast itself, is greatly appreciated. Drop a comment on this post.

One of the challenges with LightSpeed is that end users install it, create a model and then wonder what they need to do next to actually start using their LightSpeed domain models. It’s a query that we’re working hard to resolve by improving the first time experience. We think we have been doing that consistently with every release – improved help files, code generation tools and now we have made available a simple “Getting started with LightSpeed” screencast.

The screencast walks through:

• Creating a model using the LightSpeed Designer for Visual Studio 2008
• Configuring LightSpeed in a simple manner using your applications .config file
• What a LightSpeed Context is, how it relates to a Unit Of Work
• Writing CRUD style queries

It is designed as an introduction – seasoned LightSpeed users probably won’t learn anything new but we do hope it’s helpful for those who have decided to give LightSpeed a try and want to get going fast. How fast? The video is 11 minutes long.

Watch getting started with LightSpeed (Flash, streamed)
Download getting started with LightSpeed for local viewing (WMV, 16 MB)

Any feedback is appreciated – if you can think of anything else that we can do to make learning LightSpeed easier then drop us a comment!

• Connecting to a new SimpleDB instance inside Visual Studio 2008
• Managing domains
• Querying data both with Amazon query syntax and SQL-like SELECT syntax
• Editing and deleting data
• Working with attributes

View the screencast of getting started with SimpleDB Management Tools.

As always, we appreciate feedback on this – is there anything else you would like to see? something missing? Let us know in the comments :-)