Organizations moving to cloud services and Platform-as-a-Service solutions are attempting to reduce costs, increase agility and outsource their IT infrastructures. The dynamics are creating a variety of integration challenges as developers discover they need effective ways to connect to and surface critical business data. With the new range of RSSBus Data Providers for Google, QuickBooks, Salesforce.com and SharePoint, your developers can easily connect to these services and build powerful, integrated applications.

“The RSSBus Data Providers empower Microsoft Visual Studio developers with innovative tools for building a new generation of solutions that connect and interact with applications, databases and Web Services,” said Eric Madariaga, Director of Marketing for RSSBus. “They provide unprecedented ease of use and simplicity.”

The RSSBus Data Providers can databind .NET applications to internal and external services like QuickBooks, Google, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, FedEx, Salesforce, SharePoint—and it’s just as easy as binding to SQL Server. Developers can implement the connections within minutes using simple Visual Studio wizards.

What’s more, developers can leverage their existing knowledge to deliver cutting-edge WinForms, ASP.NET and Windows Mobile solutions with full read/write functionality. The RSSBus Data Providers offer complete read/write access to services through an easy-to-use interface that is already familiar to .NET developers. If your team is familiar with ADO.NET, they already know how to use the RSSBus Data Providers.

“The RSSBus Data Providers make everything look like a SQL table. It is a one-stop tool for easily connecting to virtually any data source,” said Madariaga. “Using the RSSBus Data Providers, your .NET applications interact with local applications, databases and services in the same way you work today with SQL Tables and Stored Procedures.”

As fully managed ADO.NET data providers, RSSBus Data Providers plug directly into Visual Studio and can integrate with the Visual Studio Server Explorer to provide database-like access to any of the supported data sources. And the Data Providers also can be used in code through familiar classes and in data controls like DataGridView, GridView and DataSet.

The ADO.NET data model also works perfectly with new Visual Studio technologies like LightSwitch. The RSSBus Data Providers are immediately accessible from the latest version of LightSwitch, giving developers the tools they need to build integrated applications with little or no coding required.

Madariaga explained the current RSSBus Data Provider architecture adds extensive data caching support, which is critical to ensure robust performance for data calls across disparate Web Services. The cache functionality allows data stored in remote Web-based services to be periodically cached forward to the client, providing ready offline capability or offering protection against a service outage.

Users Appreciate ADO.NET Familiarity
The database-like simplicity of the RSSBus Data Providers is immediately obvious to users. Michael Gold, president of Microgold Software, wrote a review of the RSSBus Google Data Provider for ADO.NET on C# Corner, noting that it “is laid out similarly to a SQL Server database,” and that once installed, “it works just like a SQL Data Provider.”

The Google Data Provider allows developers to easily connect their .NET applications to popular Google Services, including Gmail, Docs, Google, AdWords, Talk and Search. As you’d expect, the Data Provider makes those and other Google services look like SQL tables in applications.

Rich Dudley, a technical evangelist at ComponentOne, also commented on the “familiar, database-like programming model” in a recent blog, saying “The RSSBus QuickBooks Connector makes querying and updating QuickBooks data as simple as working with a database.”

The QuickBooks Data Provider for ADO.NET enables developers to easily retrieve data from QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online. Using it, Dudley was able to search QuickBooks data contained in “tables,” such as customer names, sales orders and invoices to get meaningful business information, like sales by product or sales by customer. Dudley used the QuickBooks Data Provider in tandem with ComponentOne OLAP for WinForms, a set of .NET data visualization controls that provide analytical processing features similar to Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts.

Support for More Services Coming in 2011
The RSSBus Data Providers for Google, QuickBooks and Salesforce.com are downloadable for purchase or trial now, while SharePoint, Twitter and e-mail providers are available as beta downloads. Plus, Madariaga said, several new RSSBus Data Providers will be available later in 2011 including SAP, Facebook, Excel and more.

All RSSBus Data Providers enable integration with simplicity. Developers can simply download a Data Provider, connect to the target service, select data to be accessed, and databind. Using the Data Providers, any .NET application can be integrated with any of the supported services, which is far easier than connecting to individual services via their APIs. Once connected, applications access the target service through the appropriate Data Provider with simple Transact-SQL.

For more information about RSSBus Data Providers, please visit www.rssbus.com.