Options for Building BCS Entities

In the 2007 version of the BCS—known at the time as the Business Data Catalog (BDC)—definitions of entities required third-party tools. A few competing tools were available, but they provided only functionality for building BDC entities. Two such products are BDC Metaman from Lightning Tools and MOSS BDC Design Studio from Simego.

However, the 2010 versions of Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer, both of which provide functionality for developing a wide range of other SharePoint features, introduce built-in BCS design and development. This can enable an easy definition of external content types for later consumption in SharePoint. The ability to build BCS functionality using the SharePoint tools already used for other SharePoint extensions is one improvement in the capabilities offered by the 2010 suite of products.

Developing external content types in Visual Studio 2010 requires a machine running SharePoint 2010. This can be either a 64-bit Windows Server 2008 machine running as a SharePoint server, or a Windows 7 machine, which is capable of running a development version of SharePoint. Details of how to develop external content types through Visual Studio 2010 is beyond the scope of this chapter.