Creating solutions with Business Data Catalog - Cape Town Event Afterthoughts
I usually really enjoy sessions and speaking engagements, but I don't remember enjoying one so much like I did last week Wednesday at Microsoft (http://dotnet.org.za/zlatan/archive/2008/11/17/event-in-cape-town-on-the-26th-of-nov-2008-creating-solutions-with-the-business-data-catalog-bdc.aspx).
Creating Solutions with BDC (Business Data Catalog) featured no death by PowerPoint, instead, after first few slides of giving an overview of what BDC is, how to use it, and how to plan for it, we jumped straight into the good stuff -> Demos!!
We demo(ed) how to create Application Definition files from BDC Meta Man (http://www.lightningtools.com/ ) and from the Microsoft BDC Tool (comes with SharePoint SDK), also, how to use ALL of the out of the box BDC web parts and how to use them in different combinations (connected web parts) by leveraging data relationships defined in a App Def file, then we jumped into how to develop custom BDC web parts (with code and all) to add to the nice dashboards that you can build, also how to get third party systems to use BDC (if some other system apart from SharePoint needs to interface with the BDC) again with code and all, how to use Business Data Columns in your SharePoint lists, how to use CAML to access BDC columns in SharePoint list, and how to configure Enterprise Search for BDC.
We've touched on some more controversial issues with BDC, like how to update BDCs, how easy it is to configure App Defs for update and how easy it is to create a custom web part to facilitate updating.
Thank you all for coming and also for great reviews, well bring you even more stuff like this in 2009.
Many thanks go to our one and only sponsor of the event -> Microsoft (coffee, drinks, food and venue), and also to the awesome SADeveloper.NET crew for organising the event and all the good prizes we gave away.