Author: James

I just wrote a small .NET application to display some database queries and I didn’t write one bit of code while doing it. I’m wondering how far we are from the “code behind” being hidden from the developer. Of course my little app didn’t do much so I was able to “avoid” having to jump into the back-end, but there seems to be a real movement toward developing applications using the WYSIWYG method rather than the old “notepad” method. ESRI demoed quite a bit of the .NET ADF where no code was written, but the results were as good as anything our little shop has created. It seems ever few years developers begin to wonder if they are working themselves out of a job, but I guess something new always comes along that requires us to dive into the code behind.

Of course I can always jump into Baseball Hacks and remember what using BBEdit (yea I do love BBEdit) is all about.

A friend of mine just said that rooms are filling up near the convention center so if you want to make sure you aren’t walking over 2 miles, you might want to get on the ball and reserve some rooms. Last year I stayed up in Solana Beach and took the Coaster right into Downtown San Diego. No worries about parking or anything. Pretty nice.

Looks like some ESRI developers aren’t sure where they fit within the new ESRI developer community.

…but those of us who are straight ArcObjects programmers for in-house applications didn’t have much choice. There were very few sessions geared to helping us RIGHT NOW, and I think that ESRI needs to understand that.

I’m sure not everyone has plans to migrate to .NET or Java in the next year so any new site should probably still cater to those who want to develop with VB, VBA or C++. At the very least there probably needs to be more migration examples and best practices to help those who want to move to .NET or Java. Like it or not, there are tons of VBA and VB6 applications being developed using ArcObjects and these folks can’t be ignored.

Declan Butler has updated his avian flu map and made some changes. First he’s changed the KML to a network link so you don’t have to download any new files to see the weekly updates, second he’s refined the datasets to help better understand the outbreak (Human cases, Outbreaks in poultry, Gridded poultry density of the world, Bird breeding and overwintering distributions) and third he’s gone ahead and is now using ESRI ArcGIS with Arc2Earth to generate the Google Earth KML. What a great example of using ArcGIS for analysis and Google Earth for distribution.

Update – Brian Flood has a great writeup on how simple it is to use Arc2Earth to make very professional Google Earth presentations of your GIS analysis. It is also a great look at how complete Arc2Earth is with its Google Earth integration.

An astute reader pointed out that the version of ArcWeb Explorer we saw demoed at the Dev Summit has made it into the wild. AWX2, as it is being called, has some pretty detailed imagery and a new navigation tool. (at least for me the “share” map link doesn’t seem to keep the satellite image on by default even though the word “hybrid” is in the url, must be a bug)

I didn’t think we’d be seeing it this soon, but it appears that ArcWeb Labs at least has a webpage. I tried to get into the SVG Viewer, but I’m getting a java error on access. At least this is something to add to your bookmarks or del.icio.us.

OK, you can now try out the ArcWEB SVG viewer yourself. At least for me, the performance is quite snappy using Internet Explorer and the SVG plug-in (that seems to have been installed by default probably thanks to some Adobe product on my laptop). Quite the busy day for the ArcWeb team, guess the Developer Summit got their juices flowing.

We’ve been struggling to figure out how to handle an AJAX application when one of its web services becomes unavailable. The problem at least for me was how to check with JavaScript to see if a web service is down. After hitting a roadblock with JavaScript, I found this post today on using Prototype to return a “network down” message if the web service is not available. Simple, clean and slick…

via Ajaxian

Want to see what the new MapGuide Open Source AJAX and DWF viewers look like? The Open Source Geospatial Foundation has a webpage with a couple examples for you to check out. Maybe Digg or Slashdot have linked to them because at least on my end they are pretty slow. I was talking about how ESRI could sell (or give away) the Web ADF so developers could use it in other applications, but maybe MapGuide Open Source could fit that bill also.

A friend of mine has been in Spain, checking out all the sites. Well when I heard there was a Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, I had to learn more. Well Google did get me to their website, but that didn’t help me at all because I had no idea where Bilbao was. My first thought was to put the address in Google Maps, but I got a weird “Sorry we don’t have maps at this zoom level” for Spain (I guess they don’t have as good world coverage as I thought). Anyway, the same problem occurred with Live Local (aka Virtual Earth). I didn’t have Google Earth on this computer so I was getting really frustrated. Then I though, what about ArcWeb Explorer? I took the address, loaded it into an Excel file and then uploaded that into ArcWeb Explorer. Bingo!

How cool will this be when the JavaScript API is out or the SVG viewer? I’m lucky that I live in a USA centric world so I usually never see how hard it is to use some of these mapping services. Glad to see at least one has great data for the rest of the world.