Category: Thoughts

I’m in the hotel and the weather is not bad (I only say that because I live in Phoenix, but I’m sure everyone else will think it is wonderful). There is wireless internet access in the bar so we should be able to wing something for the contest tonight. The one thing though that is killing me (more than the $10 a day internet access) is that there is no power outlet near the desk. I don’t think you could put the desk further from an electrical outlet if you tried. Bah, good thing I have two batteries.

See everyone tonight in the hotel bar.

The unofficial developer contest and blogger meetup will be at 6pm Thursday March 16th in the The Calabrese Lounge at the Wyndham Palm Springs. I’ll probably be in there before 6pm so just look for the guy that looks like that picture in the upper right hand side of the blog (I’m the one on the left). You don’t have to be a developer or even a blogger to come have fun. Just show up we’ll have a good time. Remember to bring any code or demos for the contest if you want to win either a cool chicken signed by Scott Morehouse for the two best or two great programming books for the last place entries (trust me these are good).

If you want to get a hold of me at the Summit or the Business Partner Conference, just take a look at my contact page for my email and or IM accounts.

Dave Bouwman has just announced that he’s converting the ArcDeveloper blog into a community for ESRI developers. He’s got a couple things outlined in the post and is looking for suggestions and feedback (comments are closed here so respond on Dave’s post).

This is something we’ll definitely have to talk about at the Developer Summit for sure.

If you want to learn more about what prizes are being offered by Steve and I for the contest, check out his blog post. Remember to be there in the hotel bar Thursday night.

Steve’s Photos

OK, I’ve gotten a couple IMs from people interested in the Chickens. They want to know what is required to enter. Well its easy. The project has to be related to ESRI in some way, with better credit given to those projects which use ArcGIS. If you’ve got an amazing MapObjects project, feel free to show it, but ArcGIS Engine would get you more “points”. Plus its not limited to just embedded GIS or server GIS. You can submit anything you’ve created with Desktop also (VB, .NET, VBA) and try and win something also. Heck with 4 prizes available, you might just win something if everyone else is too lazy.

Someone also asked me if it has to work. Well working code is better than non-working code so you might want to get it to do something before submitting it. But hey, 50% of something cool is better than nothing and that might be enough to win a Chicken.

Oh and some people have RSVP’d so I now at least a couple people will win a prize. And who wouldn’t want a Chicken on their desk inspiring them to program better GIS applications?

Kerry Coffin blogs about the new SVG Viewer for ArcWeb 2006. He’s got some info on the “Widgets” that will be available as well as some performance issues with native Firefox SVG support vs. the Adobe Plug-in. Looks really sweet guys!

Just got an email about the Arizona ESRI Developer User Group Kickoff Meeting scheduled for April 10, 2006. Since its about 100 yards from my office, I’m sure I’ll attend. I’m hopeful that much has been learned from the Denver Developer User Group Meeting, (the highlights seem to match what happened at Denver) but at least it will be a short walk back to the office. I am interested in seeing the City of Mesa ArcGIS Server case study so I might stick around.

I got an interesting email from a reader who didn’t want to be mentioned (something cloak and dagger no doubt). Anyway, he/she wanted to know why ESRI doesn’t get more involved with the GIS community. They acknowledged that there are a couple ESRI blogs, but nothing really engaging from any of them.

I’m not really sure why there hasn’t been more involvement with the ESRI folks on the blogs. I think there might be a couple of reasons. First I think everyone acknowledges that culturally it is very hard to blog at a company and I think that might be part of it. I’m not sure if there is any policy at ESRI for blogging or what backlash there has been from blogging by ESRI employees. I think the closest we saw was Eric Bader’s blog post gain a disclaimer and the fact he hasn’t followed up on it.

Blogging is a very large cultural shift for many companies and I think there will be more from ESRI in the near term (Brian Goldin mentioned blogs were coming soon from ESRI). I’m guessing ESRI employees will be more apt to blog on an internal blog service than they would be on their own as the boundaries are more defined. Some on this blog have mentioned Microsoft and Sun as great examples of blogging but they have been doing this for years longer than ESRI has. So while the blueprint is there, ESRI is taking is slow.

The second issue issue he/she mentioned was why ESRI wasn’t getting more involved with blogs. I can’t really answer that one either, but I’ve seen more @esri.com emails in comments on this blog and other in the last few months. I know Andrea Rosso has been commenting on this blog where we’ve talked about ArcWeb and others have chimed in also. I think if they could talk more about 9.2, we’d see so much more. Of course the other side to that is ESRI users are in the middle of 9.1 and while they are interested in 9.2, it really doesn’t help their production. We work with the USMC all the time and they are still on 8.3 and I’m others have the same issue. I’m glad to see Brian Goldin has said 9.1 will be the focus of the Dev Summit as most developers are working on 9.1 right now and things like the new Web ADF are really cool, unless it works with 9.1 it really isn’t any current value to us.

So lets see what happens at the Dev Summit with this new focus on community. You can be sure that developers are going to be letting ESRI know what is working and what isn’t working. I think we are all going to have a great time at the Dev Summit and we could be in for quite a change at ESRI because of it. Personally I’ve seen a change in my talks with ESRI employees so if they can figure out this blogging thing, we’ll all be in for quite a treat.

I was just thinking about the BPC and realized I haven’t even visited the site yet to see the schedule. All the buzz on the blogs is about the Dev Summit. Better go figure out what I’m going to check out for the BPC. I’d love to see some more on Image Server so I’ll probably seek that out as well as ArcWeb 2006.

Andrea has a huge post on some very interesting developments on ArcWeb 2006. He’s demoed the new SVG Viewer (using the REST API) and has a little bit on the new ArcWeb Labs section soon to appear. I’m just really hoping to see the ArcWeb Explorer API or some more on this new ArcWeb SVG viewer (make sure you go to his blog and check out that cool screenshot of the SVG Viewer). I’m just not willing to invest the time to work with SOAP and ArcWeb.

we are going to be releasing an ArcWeb Labs section of the web site. This is an area where you’ll be able to see all the new, unreleased applications we are working on and give us feedback. ArcWeb Explorer is an example of something we consider ‘in Labs’. We’ve listened to feedback from those who have posted some reviews, but of course we want this a little more formalized in a form of a Labs site where we can collect more feedback and keep you all in the loop with what we’re doing with blogs, forums, EDN, etc. For now we’ll start simple but we are planning to quickly expand the site with more features coming online periodically.

Now we are talking! Can’t wait for the Dev Summit to see this in action.