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Welcome to the second in my SharePoint 2010 series of how-to videos for developers. This one is all about Business Connectivity Services, the technology previously known as the Business Data Catalog.
The BDC in SharePoint 2007 was pretty cool. It allowed us to quickly create read-only forms from existing line of business, or back-end, systems. The technique also allowed us to index and then search data in these back-end systems in a structured way.
In this video, I’ll show how easy it is to work with SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services. We’ll use SharePoint Designer 2010 to hook up with an old friend – the Northwind database – and bring a SQL table of Contacts into SharePoint.
We’ll also see how SharePoint does the hard work for us in creating not just read only, but all the CRUD operations – create, retrieve, update, delete. It also creates InfoPath and browser forms for us, without writing a single line of code. Lastly we’ll have a look at the offline functionality of the BCS and SharePoint Workspace, including the magic of conflict resolution.