Thursday, December 23, 2010

SAP Connector for Microsoft .NET 3.0 released

Yesterday SAP made the renewed version 3.0 of the SAP Connector for Microsoft .NET (NCo) officially available. This version is the long awaited successor of NCo 2.0 - which still had a design-time and runtime dependency on .NET Framework 1.x and Visual Studio 2003.
With the NCo, it is possible to directly interoperate from a .NET consumer context with SAP RFC's. It is thus a different approach as with Duet Enterprise - in which the SAP/SharePoint interoperability is achieved via standards-based webservices. The Duet Enterprise services are provided by the SCL, which transparently encapsulates and shields the specifics of the SAP backend towards the SharePoint consuming side.
In the earlier versions the NCo used the SAP librfc32.dll to achieve the SAP/.NET binary interoperability. In NCo 3.0 the RFC protocol is fully re-implemented in the NCo itself. Main advantage is that there is no longer the dependency on the librfc32.dll being available on each .NET consuming system. Also this should result in better performance as there is no more marshalling required in .NET client runtime context from the managed .NET code to the unmanaged librfc32 invocation.
In the previous NCo versions the programming model was to generate at design-time .NET-based proxies in Visual Studio 2003 per SAP RFC that you intend to call. This involved a proxy method for the ABAP Function Module, and an individual proxy class for each structure or data table used in the RFC signature. In case of a change in the SAP backend, the implication is that it is required to regenarate the proxies, and rebuild plus deploy a new assembly for the re-generated code. In NCo 3.0, the RFC call pipeline is dynamically constructed. Whenever there is a change in the enclosed SAP back-end, the NCo on-the-fly adapts the internal RFC invocation. NCo 3.0 transparently shields the .NET consumer from modifications and upgrades in the SAP backend. However, this approach also has its downside. You are in effect developing against a weakly-typed integration API, much resembling the .NET reflection pattern. There is no compile-time validation nor protection for incorrect RFC invocations.
The NCo 3.0 can be downloaded from SAP Service Marketplace, including accompanying documentation.

2 comments:

  1. Do you have an example of connection with SAP Connector. I was able to get a copy and now I am trying to connect to the server.

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  2. The intellisense awareness was always an attractive capability with the old .NET connector and although it is no longer supported one wonders just how enthusiastic the market will be for this new approach...

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