I ran into a BDC error, “Type does not match DotNet type of TypeDescriptor”, with a particular application definition I wrote. In this case, I had a specific finder method that took one input parameter (the identifier) that was of type System.Decimal. It turns out I didn’t specify a default value in the TypeDescriptor for this input parameter in my XML definition. It looks like when you don’t set a default value, it will automatically set one for you and assign it a type of System.String. I was able to see this when I exported the BDC definition fresh, and noticed that SharePoint automatically added this default value and type for me.

Rule of thumb, always specify a default value for each input parameter.