Spatially Adjusted

Author: James

  • Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET Released

    How cool is this? Oracle has released tools for Visual Studio .NET 2003 to provide integrated support for creating .NET applications that access Oracle databases. Rather than use the weird, non-standard Oracle Java based tools or command line, you can now use the Oracle explorer to browse and alster the schema right from inside Visual Studio. We use Oracle for most of our database applications and better .NET IDE integration was always on our wish list.

    • Oracle Explorer – Browse and alter the Oracle schema via a tree control
    • Designers and Wizards – e.g. Table Designer – makes database tasks easy
    • Automatic Code Generation – Drag and drop to create working code
    • PL/SQL Editor – Edit stored procedures and functions in an integrated Visual Studio .NET environment
    • Stored Procedure Testing – Run stored procedures and functions
    • Oracle Data Window – View and edit your Oracle data
    • SQL Query Window – Execute any ad-hoc SQL statement or script
    • Integrated Help System – SQL, PL/SQL and Error Reference Manuals

    Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET

  • Why Blogging about GIS works

    I posted a blog entry moving to a .NET development environment last month and questioned what the possible licensing issues were with ArcGIS Engine. I had searched ESRI’s site to see if there was a definitive answer, but couldn’t really find much. Lucky for me ESRI Product Manager Rob Elkins saw what I wrote and offered to answer my questions. I’ve taken him up on it and he cleared up every question I had, thanks Rob!

    Weblogs are great tools for everyone. We can talk about issues that concern us in an open forum and get reaction from other bloggers and just people in general. I decided to start blogging about GIS again because our company was moving our GIS work in two new directions, from COM to .NET and into open source server side GIS. In a closed development environment I wouldn’t have had the great suggestions people have given me about connection to PostGIS and I sure wouldn’t have learned as much as I have about ArcGIS Engine.

    ESRI has a couple of bloggers that are in my blogroll, but I sure wish there were more. I’d love to see every ESRI Product Manager have a weblog to interact with users. Forums are nice, but I don’t think you get the kind of feedback that weblogs can give you. Microsoft has jumped on the weblog bandwagon and I think this gives employees better feedback than they would get with surveys such as the annual ESRI User Conference questionnaire.

  • ESRI Developer Network has arrived

    EDN showed its head this afternoon. Tomorrow when my programmer gets in I’ll set it up to start playing with ArcGIS Engine and we can see what can be accomplished with it.

    One question though, how come no MapObjects or MapObjects Java in the EDN?

  • ESRI ArcSDE on MySQL or PostgreSQL

    Another ESRI conference is upon us and I just noticed that the survey that Jack Dangermond always sends out is in my inbox. I was filling it out as I always do putting in that I’d like support for MySQL or PostgreSQL and low and behold later in the survey there is a question asking if I’d like to see either. I can’t recall if that question was ever in a previous survey, but I know people have asked again and again at the technical workshops.

    Personally I’d love to see support for either. The biggest cost for SDE isn’t always SDE itself but a RDBMS that can support enough users on the internet. I still would always recommend Oracle over any other RDBMS, but I’ve run into a couple of situations where clients don’t have the money to spend on Oracle or SQL Server for their web applications and we have to leave all GIS data as Shapefiles (bah!). I’m not getting my hopes up that there will be an annoucement, but both MySQL and PostgreSQL have really taken off in the last 5 years. Personally I’d rather have PostgreSQL support, but either would be help us with our web deployments.

  • Moving away from web based GIS

    I’ve noticed an interesting trend during the last year with our clients. Many of them have decided that internally they don’t want web based ESRI ArcIMS or similar products. We’ve worked with them to create either stand alone ESRI MapObjects applications (hopefully we’ll upgrade them to ESRI ArcGIS Engine soon) or just using ESRI ArcPublisher and ESRI ArcReader. The MapObjects applications have been more geared at management who need access to the GIS information, but not the complexity. These applications usually answer “what if” scenarios that we used to program via the web. The clients who request them don’t have or don’t want to invest the money in server side (hardware and software) GIS. Most if not all of the ArcReader implementations we’ve done use ArcSDE to store the data (some even use ArcIMS services). These clients seem to want the added cartography options that can be created with ArcMap that we’ve never really been able to get programming AXL. Printing has also been an issue. While we’ve gotten pretty good with some of our layouts on the web, they just don’t look like the ArcMap products that their GIS teams are creating. With ArcPublisher they can have the exact map their GIS analysts are working on. I’ve just received an RFP from one client that wants to look into the new ArcGlobe features of ArcPublisher which should be perfect for displaying what they want.

    I’ve always pushed web based GIS because you don’t need to install software to gain value from it. But it seems with today’s managed computer installs, rolling out ArcReader to all clients isn’t as difficult as it once was. I will say the one feature that ArcPublisher/Reader still doesn’t have is a better “pack and go”. I’d love to see a way to embed the GIS layers in the PMF so that you only need one file to send to people. PDF is a pretty good solution, but sometimes you just want to grab that ID tool and see exactly what the database behind a layer is hiding. Oh well, maybe ESRI ArcGIS 10?

    We are still developing web based solutions for clients and are even currently working on an open source solution. I just think some people have been burned by overly complex websites in the past and don’t want the overhead of maintaining them or dealing with another department that might control the webservers.

  • ESRI Developer Network

    We have finally gotten all the paperwork on our end squared away and EDN has been ordered. It will be nice to finally have a development copy of ArcGIS Engine to see how it works for us as we move from MapObjects to a pure .NET development environment. We are finishing up what will possibly be our last MapObjects application this month and I’m hoping I’ll have some time to start porting it to ArcGIS Engine to see how easy it is. The biggest wish we’ve had with MapObjects is the ability to use an ArcIMS server to host the data on. We’ve figure out ways to get the image to load in MO, but not the interactivity that say a ArcPublisher document might have.

    Between programing with Mapserver/PostGIS and ArcGIS Engine, its going to be a couple busy weeks. I couldn’t be any happier.

  • Moving Forward with Open Source GIS

    Now that we have our PostGIS/PostgreSQL running just about perfectly on our RedHat server, it is time to move forward with UMN Mapserver. I’m excited to see how much we can do with it and I think it will open up so much more to our products than .NET and ArcIMS ever did. As I said earlier, I want to make a front end that looks the same to the end users, whether we use ArcIMS/ArcSDE on the back end or Mapserver/PostGIS. In my previous post, I said that the GUI just wasn’t there for PostGIS, but letting it sit on a Linux server hosting our data should be great.

    This should be a great week as we start playing with Mapserver/PostGIS and seeing what we can do with it.

  • Patches Already? Bah!

    Believe me, I’m glad they are out, but why did this not make the RTM? I guess they needed to ship by the end of May, but I hate having to apply patches to software withing a week of it being released.

    ArcGIS Desktop 9.1 Map Document Performance Patch

    ArcGIS Desktop 9.1 Maplex for ArcGIS Formatting Tag Label Placement Patch

    Network Analyst 9.1 Network Dataset Patch

    Again, I’ll say that there needs to be an RSS feed to keep on top of these patches as they don’t show up on the “default” ESRI support homepage

  • ArcGIS 9.1 Legend Properties

    A nice new change is the ability to changes the text symbols for all legend items at once. Before you had to apply them to each layer in the legend as well as the legend title. Now all you have to do is set the text color and font, then hit apply. I spent hours two weeks ago messing with these settings on 9.0.x to match the documents type font and colors. A very nice improvement if you ask me.

    ArcGIS91 Legend

  • More About ESRI ArcIMS 9.1

    In my previous post, ESRI ArcIMS 9.1, is there a point? I asked why didn’t ESRI spell out the changes in ArcIMS 9.1. Well I just noticed there is now a whitepaper outlining the changes and new features of ArcIMS 9.1. This is exactly the information I was looking for, but it was buried in ESRI’s support site. If there was ever a reason to have RSS feeds for support, this is it. I’m sure there is much that gets posted in the knowlege base that most users of the support site never see unless they perform a search. I’d love to get feeds of the latest posting of all support site software, Arcscripts and knowlege base/whitepaper articles. That would be killer!

    Most of the changes are evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary, but that is fine. I’d prefer stability on the server side and ArcIMS 9.1 seems to do this. There is only one concern I have:

    The ArcXML Guide is provided only in HTML format.

    Why do this? Personally I always work off of printed material rather than help or websites for the AXL reference. It doesn’t look like there are many changes in the AXL since 9.0, but the future scares me. Moving from printed manuals to PDF was difficult enough, but not even providing a way for us to print them out on our own just hurts. Hopefully ESRI will revisit this and make sure that in the future PDF manuals are an option.

    Tomorrow we’ll start testing our existing ArcIMS 9.0.x applications with 9.1, but I’m guessing they will work without any modifications. I’m looking forward to see how it works.