I had the chance to review a copy of “SharePoint 2007 Developer's Guide to Business Data Catalog” written by Brett Lonsdale, Nick Swan and published by Manning Publications Co.

Brett and Nick both authors of the “BDC Meta Man”, a tool for generating the BDC application definition file share their experience in this book.

Here are some of the salient points of the book.

1.       The authors discuss the Business Data Catalog (BDC) in detail, its benefits and architecture and how to create the Application Definition File from scratch.

2.       The chapter on security covers in detail the authentication and authorization process, configuring LOB Application permissions, setting Entity permissions and setting up Single Sign On

3.       The primary purpose of the BDC is to surface data onto the SharePoint Server portal without writing code. The book describes the use of out of the box web parts to display data, using BDC data in SharePoint lists, configuring search to search backend LOB applications and how to incorporate BDC data to enhance the user profiles.

4.       The Business Data Catalog has its own runtime Object Model that allows developers to access data from the Business Data Catalog. There is a complete chapter describing the Application Registry Namespace (ApplicationRegistry was the prior name of the Business Data Catalog). The ApplicationRegistry allows us to harness the full power of BDC from within Visual Studio.NET.  The chapter “Authoring a custom BDC Web Part” shows you how to create a custom BDC web part by utilizing the BDC object model.

5.       You may be surprised that the BDC does actually support Read/Write both in the Object Model and in the Application Definition File. It is the Web Parts that simply don't support Write Back or Updates.

6.       Lastly there are three appendix which describe

a.       Using BDC to connect to SAP

b.      Connecting BDC with Oracle

c.       Using Web Services as a Data Source

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