Deploying LightSwitch Applications

Hopefully this is because LightSwitch is still in beta (as of this writing on 5/31/11) but from our research and testing, it seems that the documentation in the following article is correct:

"Publishing a 3-tier application requires that you have administrative access to a server that is running IIS and is preconfigured for LightSwitch, and also that you have administrative access to a computer that is running SQL Server." (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff872288.aspx)

That's a tremendous failure (if not addressed) of the product. It means that publishing a LightSwitch application to a shared host is not an option (though I've heard of possible manual configuration workarounds). It also means that in a corporate world you either need a trusted deployment team with elevated permissions, or you need to give your developers or QA people administrative access to servers (generally a no-no).

LightSwitch has a Publish Application Wizard that seems to leverage Web Deploy so hopefully the LightSwitch team will address this publishing challenge so that any host supporting standard Web Deploy services can accept and support LightSwitch applications.