Well, today was already scheduled to be a short day, but between a VPC failure (seems to be a common theme… a few presenters also has this issue) and some issues back in the office, it looks like I'll probably miss the rest of the day. It solves one challenge… Which presentation to go to at the end.
Unfortunately, whoever scheduled the presentations set 3 or 4 really good presenters and topics all against each other, so the choice was tough… I was leaning toward either Dustin's Data Part Deep Dive, or AC's Internet WCM, but Neil Iversen had a really good looking topic (MOSS PowerShell) that he teased us with earlier in his Advanced Features presentation, and Veli-Matti Vanamo had one that looked tempting called Branding your site with Site Definitions and Features.
I did get a chance to catch Todd Baginski's BDC presentation though, as well as Neil Iversen's SharePoint Mobile presentation. Here's my notes for both:
When using the BDC, you cannot authenticate with FBA. This will cause issues with the BDC – Todd mentioned that he thought he remebers hearing/reading someone say they found a way around this, but couldn't find it later. Also, when you index the BDC and rows are pulled for a search query, the action hyperlinked to the search result is the "default" action created by the system when you created the BDC Application. You can modify the default to have the behavior you'd like on search results.
There are two commonly used tools out there today for working with the BDC to get away from hand typing all the XML for an Application Definition file. The BDCMetaMan (Which Todd used to be a part of before SharePoint Experts) and the MS BDC Tool, aka "Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor", which can be downloaded as a part of the August 2007 MOSS SDK.
There are a couple of major differences in usage and result between the BDC and it's OOB web parts and SPD and the Data View web part. These are primarily that the BDC is very simple (when using a tool for the App Def file), fast to generate results, ghosted (or uncustomized) for performance and simplicity. It can be customized using custom written Web Apps or through custom XSL, but these take away from the two biggest benefits, simplicity and speed. The Data View wep part on the other hand is not quite a simple or fast (unless you're Dustin on one of those demos… Man, he flies through that!), but is worlds more customizable, can hook to more than just a web service or database, is unghosted (or customized), and generally offers much more control.
I took a chance on Neil Iversen's SharePoint Mobile presentation, as it is not a very popular topic generally speaking, but I heard Neil speak earlier on Features, and thought he did a good job, and I don't know much beyond the OOB mobile options that are in SharePoint, so I gave it a shot. The audience was fairly small, but Neil took it in stride and gave a good presentation, rich in demos. Here are a few notes I got from his presentation:
All SharePoint Site Templates map to one of two mobile templates, except for the central admin tremplates (and SSP) and the Meeting Site templates. All others use the general Mobile template, or for Blog and Wiki sites, the Blog Mobile Template. the Mobile files that map to the "/m" in the URL of a mobile site are held in the layoutsmobile folder in "12". ASP.Net web controls are mapped to ASP.Net Mobile controls, which in many cases is similar, in other is compltely different, such as the date picker. In a regular site this is a calender pop-up picker, but on a mobile site, this is just a text box. Another example is the multiple upload interface. In a regular site it is virtually unlimited, but on a mobile site it is limited to 3 files.
The SDK contains some good detail on changing some of the templates for mobile, as well as the mobile restriction parameters, such as how many characters to show on a line before displaying the "…". These settings can easily be changed with a feature. Neil said he would post some samples of this on his blog in a few days, I also noticed during his presentation that he is definately a DOS/Notepad kind of guy… Don't see many of those anymore without a penguin on thier shirts 
He also mentioned that occassionally, mobile sites have cache issues that prevent them from showing some of the new changes (template and parameters) even after an IIS Reset. He recommended using the "Fiddler" tool from Microsoft to monitor and possible flush the cache if you experience this issue.
Overall, there was a lot of good stuff this year, but I have to agree with Eric Shupps on his observations of the conference (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3). 1) The wireless was pretty darn lousy. Very spotty, and sporadic with performance. 2) What is the deal with the Vendor Hall? It kept being closed then opened, then closed the opened, them closed for good before the conference was even over! Hopefully the 42 comment cards I filled out with that info gets in the hands of the right people 
josef.nielsen