The Business Data Connectivity (BCS) Service in SharePoint 2010 is one of the features which routinely shows me some serious value and reward. Working with external line-of-business (LOB) application data in MOSS 2007 wasn’t the most straightforward development task with one of the biggest constraints (in this developer’s opinion) being the lack of tooling. Microsoft has more than made [...]
On a recent project, your humble narrator recently found himself needing to harvest some data from a WCF service for display in that most common of SharePoint development scenarios, the custom Web Part. It quickly dawned upon my tiny intellect, however, that in a Web Part project, there is no config file in which to define the bindings and endpoints required by a Service Reference. What, then, was an enterprising young Web Part developer cum WCF consumer to do?