Setting up Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010

The Business Connectivity Services (BCS) are a set of services which are used to connect to external data such as a SQL Server database. In combination with SharePoint designer, it is fairly easy to create external content types and lists (creating it in Visual Studio is also a possibility but more difficult to do). Personally, I had a little bit of difficulty setting it up the whole thing. The first thing I tried to do was to create an external content type for an arbitrary table in SQL Server, but I got the following error in SharePoint Designer: "The Business Data Connectivity Metadata Store is currently unavailable."

Other SP peers seemed to have the same problem and many could solve it by installing a WCF hotfix (KB976462), however this did not work for me. I will show you three checks I did in order to have stuff working. 1. Check if the Business Data Connectivity Service is running. You can find it by going to "Central Administration" -> "Manage services on server". If it has stopped, start it again.

2. Make sure you've got a Business Data Connectivity Service Application set up in "Application Management" ->"Service Applications"->"Manage service applications"

3. The next one is what I overlooked and made me waste hours of my life. Go to "Application Management"->"Service Applications"->"Configure service applications associations". In here you need to check whether your BCS Application Proxy is checked, otherwise it won't work.

Appliance of Strategy Design Pattern

Here is a small example of how I used the Strategy Design Pattern to re-use specific methods

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

// Appliance of the Strategy Pattern

namespace ConsoleApplication5
{
        class Program
        {
            static void Main(string[] args)
            {
                Dude Earl = new Dude("Albert");
                Dude Gary = new Dude("Gary");
            
                Earl.SetMorningRitual(new CigaretteSmoker());
                Gary.SetMorningRitual(new CoffeeDrinker());

                Earl.WakeUp();
                Gary.WakeUp();
            
                // During the day Earl decides to give up smoking and start drinking coffee in the morning instead.

                Earl.SetMorningRitual(new CoffeeDrinker());
                Earl.WakeUp();
                Console.ReadKey();

            }
        }

        class Dude
        {
            IMorningRitual _behaviour;
            String _name;

            public Dude(String MyName)
            {
                _name = MyName;
            }

            public void SetMorningRitual(IMorningRitual Behaviour)
            {
                _behaviour = Behaviour;
            }

            public void WakeUp()
            {
                Console.WriteLine(this._name + " just woke up");
                _behaviour.DoMorningRitual();
            }
        }

        public interface IMorningRitual
        {
            void DoMorningRitual();
        }

        public class CigaretteSmoker : IMorningRitual
        {
            public void DoMorningRitual()
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Still sleepy but gonna smoke one anyway.. *lights cigarette\n");
            }
        }

        public class CoffeeDrinker : IMorningRitual
        {
            public void DoMorningRitual()
            {
                Console.WriteLine("A morning without coffee is like something without something. Aahhh delicious!\n");
            }
        }

}