Summary

This hour looked at Business Connectivity Services. On many occasions you need to work with external data in SharePoint. Business Connectivity Services provides you with a structured framework to retrieve external data. In this hour you learned the concepts of external content types and external lists, and you created an external content type and an external list to retrieve data from a SQL database table. In addition you also created an external content type and an external list through Visual Studio 2010. For those who have worked on Business Data Connectivity in SharePoint 2007, what you did in this hour in Business Connectivity Services will appear as a major improvement over BDC. While business connectivity is too vast a topic to cover completely in one hour, you should now have a good understanding of the important aspects of Business Connectivity Services.