Part V: Business Connectivity Services (BCS)

In this part of the book, you'll integrate external data into your SharePoint solution using Business Connectivity Services (BCS). BCS is a significant improvement over the Business Data Catalog (BDC) provided with SharePoint 2007. With BCS, you'll create an external content type (ECT) that represents data from an external data source. Then you can create a list based on this content type, which will function like the native SharePoint lists.

In Chapter 18, you'll create ECTs using the SharePoint Designer, which connects to a SQL Server database. You will also create multiple ECTs that are associated based on a common field and see how the forms provide an instance picker based on this association. In Chapter 19, you will build a .NET Assembly Connector in Visual Studio 2010. This will allow you to create an ECT to any data that you can access from your .NET code. Chapter 20 will demonstrate how these lists can be integrated into Outlook 2010.

The sample projects use the tables that are provided in the AdventureWorks sample SQL Server database. If you do not have an SQL Server with the AdventureWorks database, you can download the latest version at http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/24854. I have the SQL 2008 R2 version installed, but previous versions should work fine as well.