For many years I have used the old "SAP DCOM Connector" to communicate between Microsoft based applications and SAP. Unfortunately this old but good and performant technology is no longer supported by SAP since years. Therefore I want and must migrate to another newer technology.
First there is the "SAP Connector for .NET 2.0". At first glance it seems to be a good replacement. But this connector can only used with .NET 1.1 (with a workaround also with .NET 2.0) and there is no further development in the future. Shame on you SAP !! SAP says, in the future we should use the "Enterprise Services Explorer" for Visual Studio. But this technology is only available for ECC6.0 and not for 4.6C. And that's the point. I need a modern technology, which is available for 4.6C and ECC6.0 !!
So I did some investigations and discovered the product "ERPConnect" from "Theobald-Software". It looks really nice and they have a good and cheap license model. The first problem with this product is, that it is not allowed to give the source code of applications, which are based on ERPConnect, to the customer. That's strange, because often customers also buy the rights for the application sources. The second problem is, that this product is not from SAP and is also not certified from SAP . Many customers don't want a product from a third party.
So now my question is: are there further possibilities to connect the Microsoft World with the SAP World and does somebody know alternatives to the above mentioned methods ? Especially I need alternatives for using RFCs.
Great News: SAP has announced release 3.0 of the SAP .NET Connector. It will support current Windows releases (Windows XP 32 Bit, Windows 2003 32/64 Bit (x64), Windows Vista 32/64 Bit (x64), Windows 2008 64 Bit (x64) and later Windows 7) as well as up-to-date Microsoft .NET Runtime versions (2.0, 3.0 and 3.5). See http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/ABAPConn/ABAP+Connectivity+Home and http://service.sap.com/connectors