Chapter 8. The ApplicationRegistry namespace
This chapter covers
What the Business Data Catalog can do out of the box is extremely powerful. Except for writing the application definition file by hand, it’s extremely easy, too. But every company is different, and no matter how hard you try as a software developer, you’ll never be able to satisfy every company’s requirements. We now know that we can customize the BDC Web Parts with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (SPD). But sometimes that just isn’t enough. With SPD, our hands are still tied to whatever operation SPD allows us to perform. So when we need real power, we have to turn to Visual Studio.NET. What can we do with BDC data that we can’t do with SPD? Well—anything! If you need to manipulate the data and present it in a customized way, Visual Studio.NET will allow you to do it. First, you may need to present your data differently, such as display the data in a chart, export it to another application, make it available through a web service, or use it within an Office-based application. Microsoft provides a BDC API to help you achieve these goals.