Lighting tools announced a price change for their Web Edition of the popular “BDC Meta Man” product. If you’ve ever had to create a BDC (Business Data Catalog) application in SharePoint you’ve probable run across this utility.
They were the first – and Microsoft tried poorly to create an editor of their own.
But for most people the cost of the Web Edition was just too costly. Why spend the money just to get a different UI when most BDC definition files are created in a development or staging environment then simply uploaded to the production server after testing?
Now it’s at least somewhat palatable; though if you truly want to GROK what goes on behind the scenes of the BDC my suggestion is still to suck-it-up and try creating a definition with your favorite text or XML editor.
Here are a few tutorials:
Sahil Malik’s BDC Hello World Example
A list of available connection options from HTTPCode
Tobias Zimmergren discusses using the Microsoft Application Definition tool