Category: Thoughts

Via Dave Bouwman
ESRI has posted the technical session agenda on the Dev Summit website. I’m looking forward to the descriptions of these sessions, but I agree with Dave in that they look like they will be of great value to me and my staff. I can tell you that there is one session I won’t be missing, “Extreme Makeover: Moving from MapObjects to ArcGIS Engine”. 🙂

Link – Autodesk product naming poll

The Mapserver Foundation is running a poll to try and determine what the new name of Mapserver Enterprise (MapGuide) should be. You’ll need to either login or register to vote, but if you do please make sure to comment with any ideas. You can view the poll results here. Personally I’ve always like the MapGuide name, but I do see the argument that the Foundation itself could benefit from Autodesk Mapserver being branded that way.

Very though choices.

Link – ESRI Support Center Home

Well how about that? I was just going write a post wondering why the announcement of ArcGIS 9.1 SP1 wasn’t on the front page of ESRI Support but to my surprise ESRI reorganized the front page and the service pack is front and center.

Not only do you get the latest knowledge base, downloads and forums right on the front page, but right below you’ll see an RSS feed for “Common Issues”. We’ll have to see how this feed works and what ends up on it, but now finding the latest support information should be as easy as looking at the front page.

Great news! The only issue I see is the page looks better in Internet Explorer than Firefox, but that is merely cosmetic.

Link – ArcGIS 9.1 Service Pack 1

ESRI recommends that all ArcGIS 9.1 customers download and install this Service Pack, at their earliest convenience, to ensure the highest quality experience when working with ArcGIS 9.1.

Click here to read the issues addressed with ArcGIS 9.1 Service Pack 1. SP1 is available for ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Engine Runtime, ArcGIS Engine Developer Kit, ArcReader and ArcGIS Server. SP1 for ArcGIS Desktop runs pretty large at over 60 MB so you might want to grab it before the download servers get swamped.

Update – Looks like ArcIMS and ArcSDE SP1 are “coming soon”.

We’ve been talking much about ESRI and their support over the past few days and most people seem to like the layout and organization of MSDN. We’ll MSDN has announced they are now previewing a beta MSDN homepage. There really isn’t too much new I can tell for U.S. customers, but it seems you can now customize it for your own local which should make those in other countries happy.

The big news as I see it is the new My MSDN which allows you to personalized content such as news, events, webcasts and other MSDN features. You pick the topics you are interested in such as ASP.NET, C#, SQL, etc and the page generates based on those choices. Now that would be a great feature for ESRI, I know they used to have that MyESRI page back with the old 8.x releases, should be easy to recycle that url into something interesting such as this.

I just got a letter today in regards to our MapObjects development. Basically the letter gives MapObjects users a free complimentary EDN subscription. I’m sure this is to get more of us to develop with ArcGIS Engine and better exposure to some of the new tools for ArcGIS development. I’ll probably take advantage of this, but we’ll continue developing for MapObjects for as long as we continue to get work that is better suited for it than ArcGIS Engine.

I’m curious though, how much longer before ESRI pulls the plug on MapObjects?

I’m sure most of you by now know that the venerable Konfabulator is now called Yahoo! Widget Engine. I’ve posted about the Yahoo! Maps widget (my web mapping tool of choice) before, but I figured why not create a widget of my own (like I got nothing better to do than play with Javascript). Well I took a look at what widgets were out there and decided that a RSS widget would be both easy and possibly useful especially since I don’t think there are any Planet Geospatial widgets out there yet. _cough_

Anyway I hacked up a RSS Widget for Yahoo! Widget Engine that you can run on your desktop and stay up to date on all the Planet Geospatial updates without having to visit the website or even open up your RSS Aggregator. So if that interests you, download the widget below and if you don’t have Yahoo! Widget Engine yet, you’ll need to download and install that also.

Planet Geospatial RSS Widget Download

Yahoo! Widget Engine Download

On the right hand side of the front page of EDN this is asked.

How would you like to receive your EDN software?

Seems like a good question, but take a look at the answers results:

What self respecting developer wouldn’t rather have ISO downloads of EDN software? The binder is really professional, but I’d rather not have to worry about where I stored it and know a quick login to EDN and my subscription can be downloaded.

And my son can’t contain himself. He is so hoping there will be a fire engine with a big ladder under the tree. I’m sure Santa will bring him one. I guess it is hard to be two years old, I sure can’t remember.

Connor Fee in front of the Christmas tree

Well it seems to have calmed down. I’m not sure what happened, but it seems like I hit a nerve with the post, which was not my intention (I was actually posting about Mapguide, but hey what are you going to do). I got an email from someone in the press who wanted my thoughts about this thread which was interesting. I’ve posted again and again about the problems with EDN, ArcScripts and the support wait times. There isn’t anything new in this last post that I haven’t posted about before so if you want my thoughts about ESRI, you have a whole blog here to go off of (and yes half the posts contradict the other half).