I attended the first ever ArcGIS .NET Developer Special Interest Group Meeting (SIG) today and was happy to see so many ESRI developers who are really interested in GIS programming. I also got to meet fact to face many of the bloggers who will be at our blogger meetup later today at Dick’s Last Resort (6pm). Art Haddad lead the discussion and programmers such as Brian Flood and Jithen Singh talked about some of the development they are doing (J will be presenting his project tomorrow at 3pm). Art then opened up discussion with Brian Golden about what us developers would like to see with the new ESRI Developer Network (EDN). Many liked the idea of a “gotdotnet” where we can all share our code as well as a ESRI Developer Summit where deeper level discussion of developing using ESRI tools could happen. Many also said RSS feeds as well as email alerts to updates and changes in the EDN site.
Rob Elkins let us know that EDN subscribers would be allowed in the 9.2 BETA program so we will be able to test our products against changes that are being made with ArcGIS 9.2. One concern brought up was developers who don’t have EDN because they already have all the software contained in it but don’t want to be left out of the EDN community. It sounds like that even though EDN is currently open to all, Rob and Brian will make sure that these developers will be included in any EDN or Developer SIG or Summits.
I thought the turnout was great given that the SIG was during lunch and I think everyone there was enthusiastic about getting together again at a Dev Summit in the future. Even Microsoft stopped by and let us know if there was anyway they could help out.