SharePoint 2010 BCS workshop with Scot Hillier

Overview:  attended a workshop on Business Connectivity Services (BCS) given by Scot Hillier in Den Haag (The Hague).  I have used BDC in MOSS and the BCS in SP2010  briefly.  I can honestly say I am now a BCS convert.  I know BCS was an improvement on BDC but looking at the tooling and going building advanced BCS solutions is really powerful and covers a lot more that I understood or had seen in a previous demo.

Summary:

• Office can use BCS - pretty obvious but I didn't realise the client application goes straight from the client application i.e. work/outlook to the SQL/WCF/.NET data type directly.
• Double hop issue with NTLM.  Scot laid out a table to direct the options available for various scenarios that I will hopefully post here.
• Secure Store Service is extensively used for authentication in BCS.
• SPD has a good tool set for BCS.  Probably the place to start.
• SQL 2000 doesn't work as an External Content Type (ECT) - this needs verification.
• BCS doesn't support transactions and is not strongly typed however data access options can be intermingled to get transaction functionality if you need it. 

http://uscatu.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/business-connectivity-services-deep-dive-mdvwrk1-%e2%80%93-my-notes/  A far better summary was written by my fellow attendee Razvan-Petru.

BCS versions feature table