Toolkit Extends SAP Portal to .NET

Components for SAP’s NetWeaver Enterprise Portal that use the .NET Framework will be easier to build with a new add-in to Visual Studio. The new toolkit shows that Microsoft and SAP can work together when necessary, but it also demonstrates that each views its own developer platform as the primary API to be used for accessing enterprise applications and sees the other as one of many possible back-end systems.

Extending NetWeaver to .NET

The SAP Portal Development Kit (PDK) for .NET is an add-in to Visual Studio that simplifies the task of building NetWeaver components known as “iViews” with Microsoft’s .NET Framework and languages such as C# and Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET). NetWeaver is an umbrella term for a collection of SAP technologies, including an Enterprise Portal and a knowledge management and collaboration product, among others. The PDK includes several components designed to increase interoperability between the SAP Enterprise Portal and .NET:

The SAP .NET Runtime passes requests from the Enterprise Portal’s built-in Web server to the .NET components, giving them information such as the profile of the user accessing the portal. Despite the similarity in names, the SAP .NET Runtime is not a replacement for Microsoft’s .NET Runtime-rather it facilitates communication between SAP’s portal and software that uses the .NET Runtime.