The SI SharePoint Blog

The right way to think of Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010 is probably as a pipe you can attach your data to, and, once you’re connected, that pipe can take you anywhere within SharePoint and Office.  One shouldn’t be taken in by the hype here – this is the sort of functionality Microsoft often oversells as a magical tool for anything – but within the limitations BCS looks like a really useful technology for anyone who has data in various systems that they want to display in a SharePoint context.  Which is probably everyone.

There are four approaches to BCS, two of them are comparatively easy and can be used with SharePoint Designer, and the other two are more difficult and are used with Visual Studio.

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SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 really does a lot to improve working conditions for developers, by doing the initial XML plumbing involved in making features etc. for you.  But of course when something goes wrong you still have to know what it all means.  The configuration technology hasn’t actually become simpler, but you can expect to spend less time dealing with it, and more time actually making stuff.

The developer dashboard is one of these neat developer features.  It displays the time taken for each database query, web part etc. that runs on the page you’re looking at.  And you can extend it yourself by using SPMonitoredScope.

I ran into an interesting problem getting the developer dashboard to work. To enable the developer dashboard, you run:

stsadm -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv OnDemand

At first I mistyped the property-name as developer-dsahboard.  Stsadm didn’t give any error messages, just its normal cheerful “can do!” message, so I couldn’t understand why the dashboard didn’t appear in the menu.  When I called getproperty (with the same typo), it returned the value I had set.  Does this mean that you can just create your own custom farm-wide properties by typing in a name that isn’t already in use?  I can think of some uses for that.

SharePoint Designer looks really good.  I’ve always been uncomfortable with it, because the customization you made were difficult to package and deploy elsewhere.  It remains to see if and how this has been improved, but with 2010, SharePoint Designer has also become a powerful administration tool for SharePoint data, and will probably be popular with anyone who administrates or configures SharePoint solutions for that reason alone.

What’s impressed me most so far is everything you can do with lists.  You can query them with LINQ, access them remotely with the client object model, and also with REST services.  The underlying technology hasn’t changed much, but it has become easier to use the data in interesting ways.  And with BCS and external lists to provide external data sources, things could get really interesting.  That’s next on my list of things to check out.