Thursday 24 March 2011

SharePoint 2010 BdcModelBuilder

I'm currently working on a public release of a tool I wrote a while ago for generating VS 2010 Bdc Models from a DLL which exposes Web Service (WCF/ASMX) reference or other API calls. The original version was written using Winforms .Net 3.5 and the new version is WPF .Net 4 and I'm currently re-jigging the code to use a nice MVVM pattern rather than doing a re-hash of the original!

I originally wrote this application because the SharePoint designer BDC functionality could not handle complex web services with deep return and parameter objects such as requests and responses with container objects and we wanted a way of easily integrating web services in a consistent manner without having to manually produce VS BDC models.

The app has a nice UI which reflects the target DLL and allows the user to pick an entity then the CRUD methods required for the model. C# and BDCM XML is generated for the entity, BDCM and service classes which are written to a package.

A template will be provided shortly after the application release.