BPC Keynote BCS Resing

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hello Best Practices Conference!I’m Tom Resing. Can you believe my first programming job was 18 years ago right across the Potomac at the Naval Research Lab? You might ask, How did I get a job like that at age 16? I give a lot of the credit to my mom for the learning opportunities. She’s here in the room this morning. Will you help me give her a hand? Kay Resing will you stand up?While my mom took care of my early education, I went to Redmond for the Microsoft Certified Master in SharePoint because I wanted a new challenge. I went for the same reason you’re here today. To learn more about SharePoint. Those 3 weeks were harder than Differential Equations at Northwestern. But I had fun and got to know very talented people like Brian and Spence. I eventually passed all the tests and I’m proud to be in the group of MCMs including Mirjiam, Chris and Maurice, who’ll also be at the conference. Now, as a Principal Software Engineer at Applied Information Sciences, I put that new knowledge to work every day. My clients want to share information. They want to help their clients. I help them by designing solutions that build on SharePoint.
• #3: Did I mention I live in Texas? This was a popular shirt in Austin in January. (Texas lost to Alabama)Let’s cut the bull. I chose to talk about Business Connectivity Services because I’m honestly excited about the potential here. If you used or are using the 2007 version of SharePoint with the Business Data Catalog you know the beauty and the pain. The beauty of the 2007 version is how tightly you can tie in data from outside SharePoint. You can
• #5: If you’re not on 2010 yet, don’t be afraid to use BDC today. The barrier to entry is much higher. You need to be an IT Pro to configure BDC. But if you are, be secure in the knowledge that Microsoft has continued to invest and improve the technology behind it. You might manually recreate the application in 2010, but it will be a lot easier and you will benefit from the BDC in the mean time.
• #6: You have two tool options for creating External Content Types in BCS. You can create them in SharePoint Designer 2010 or Visual Studio 2010. Stick with SharePoint Designer, at least to start with. You’ll find that so much of the functionality you need for connecting to the information outside SharePoint is there. Most likely, if you do go to customizing in Visual Studio, you’ll still want to use the external content type you created in SharePoint Designer.
• #7: The last best practice for BCS I’ll give you today is about security.