Yesterday, a new MOSS 2007 SDK was released and I am pretty excited about it for a number of reasons. First, the documentation is a bit more complete. Secondly, there is a new CHM included called MOSS 2007 Technical Articles and How-tos. This new CHM covers Excel Services more and also has videos on how to do various things in MOSS including the BDC and Enterprise Search. The thing that I like the most though is the new Business Data Catalog Definition Editor. Sorry BDC Meta Man, this looks like an end to your product.
This tool is pretty nice. It has a nice interface and can interact with anything you can pass a connection string to or a web service. It is really easy to add methods, however it does not create an Id enumerator out of the box (needed for Enterprise Search). Luckily that is easy to create. It can also use raw SQL or stored procedures. The nice thing I like about the tool is that it can Import existing XML files no matter how much I customize them. With BDC Meta Man, after I imported my custom security settings, it could not import the file any more.
The Business Data Catalog Definition Editor is installed seperately after you install the new MOSS SDK (be sure and uninstall the older one first). The installer can be found in Program Files\2007 Office System Developer Resources\Tools\BDC Definition Editor. For some reason the installation requires its own version of SQL Express (which it installs). The installation was pretty slow for some reason so be warned. I think it uses the database to persist state becuase when I launched the app again it had the same LOB system open.
If you do any BDC development (or MOSS development for that matter), I recommend you go download the new MOSS SDK today.
Office Server SDK
Read the complete post at http://www.dotnettipoftheday.com/blog.aspx?id=379