Category: Thoughts

Link – ArcNews

A perfect example to why quarterly publications aren’t valuable anymore is the latest ArcNews. The ESRI rss feed sums it up perfectly, “User Conference highlights and Image Server news among the top stories”. Both topics are important, but quite dated. If ArcNews was more relevant to current news the top stories should be ArcWeb 2006 and the ArcGIS Visual Studio .NET Integration Framework. ArcWeb is in the issue, but the announcement that Public ArcWeb services are available, YIKES! Oh well, maybe by March we’ll get some ESRI Katrina stories.

I would think this publication would be of more value if it was dropped as a print ‘newspaper” and became a online magazine updated as ESRI product news happens.

Link – ArcWeb Services

I went to login to my ArcWeb Services account this morning and low and behold I was forwarded to the ArcWeb 2006 page. The main ESRI ArcWeb page doesn’t seem to be updated, but as far as I can tell it should be soon. There are many new and cool features in 2006 that I’ll try and go into during the day, but many will want to take special note of the new REST support. A short week means I have to squeeze 40 hours of work into 24 hours of time (why does it never work in the reverse), but I’m going to spend some time playing over the Thanksgiving Day weekend with Public ArcWeb Services and REST.

Update – It looks like it isn’t totally available yet as the ArcWeb Explorer demo isn’t up, but I suspect we’ll be seeing this sometime this week.

Link – Hurricane Disaster Viewer

Looks like Tropical Storm Gamma is working its way toward Florida.

Link – Flash Macromedia Components for ArcIMS

Using Macromedia Flash seems to be the hot item these days, so why not bail on the HTML viewer in ArcIMS and create your own Flash front end. There are some nice examples on the developer website and even a SWF file you can download and point to your own IMS server to test it out. I suspect we’ll be seeming much more Flash now that Yahoo! and ESRI are using it on their web based mapping services.

Well my trip to the high desert is finally over. From China Lake to El Centro I ended hitting all the hot spots. Anyway, I got lots of email I need to respond to so anyone who has sent an email, please be patient. Also, I’m going to be totally be redoing Planet Geospatial as there have been some big problems with the feed and the webpage itself. I’ve got a good idea (well the last change to Planet Geospatial was supposedly a good idea) on how to improve it.

Anyway, its good to be back home sitting on the couch and watching House of Mouse with my son (except I just realized it is only Thursday, not Friday), damn.

That was an instant message from a friend (we’ll call him Adam even though that isn’t his real name) who wanted to know why he received a Microsoft Access file, rather than GIS data from a client. Adam also wondered why the Access document was over a GB and only contained tables. I explained to him about personal geodatabases and how they work and what is needed to use/view them. Of course Adam isn’t a GIS Professional, he’s a planner (yea, insert your favorite planner joke right there), but he did have a good question after contacting his GIS department.

How do I get a record of what is in that geodatabase? I don’t have ArcCatalog.

I told him to point his GIS team to one of my favorite free ESRI GIS tools (that is unfortunately hidden in the ArcScripts fiasco) called Geodatabase Reporter.NET. This tool is built using Microsoft’s .NET Framework and ESRI’s ArcEngine so you’ll need at least the ArcGIS license (Engine, View, Editor or Info) or higher.

GR.NET has 4 main components that allow users to get information about Geodatabases; Schema Reporter, Data Reporter, Geometric Network Rule Editor and Topology Rule Editor. I won’t go into all of them, but focus on the one that will help Adam the best. The GR.NET data report basically summarizes the data contained within every geodatabase object class and gives row/feature counts, spatial extents and a dataset snapshot. What this means is you get an inventory of your geodatabase. I use it to find empty object classes or subtypes that can be hard to find with ArcCatalog. I’ve included a sample of the report below. As you can see, this can be very valuable to many people who just want an inventory of new geodatabases.

For users, the help file is very well done (better than some manuals I’ve seen come out of ESRI) and walks you through all the options you have with the tool. An added bonus is that the source code is included to the C# application so GIS programmers can improve on the tools for their own use. I’d love to see ESRI start their own GotDotNet portal for tools such as this and maybe a sandbox for more ESRI applications created by their programmers what I’m sure would be welcomed by most GIS Professionals.

Adam showed me the data report of his geodatabase and I’m very impressed with how it was laid out. He’s lucky that everything is SDSFIE compliant and he’ll be able to task his GIS department with analysis and cartography requests with ease.

Link – Step-By-Step Guide to Converting Web Projects from Visual Studio .NET 2002/2003 to Visual Studio 2005

This is never as easy as it should be, but at least Microsoft has created a guide to accomplish moving ASP.NET from VS.NET 2003 to VS.NET 2005. Our IT group has given the OK to move to Visual Studio 2005 so we’ll probably begin to do this soon.

I spent most of the day at ESRI’s Redlands Campus talking with some members of the ArcGIS Server team as well as getting some demos of new software ESRI plans to release in the next few months (signed a NDA so I can’t say much of anything). Bascially throw out what you think you know about ESRI’s server products and prepare to be amazed. There are some well thought out ideas and concepts that will help all GIS Professionals. I’m excited and soon you will be too.

Link – Monkeying with Planet Geospatial

Pgeofilter will scrub the Planet Geospatial front page of entries from a single blog. You will need to make one edit to the code to specify that blog. Note that with a little cut and paste you could hack this script to filter several blogs. Please note that this script is aimed at the mid-November incarnation of Planet Geospatial. I’m using it to filter out the echoes on Planet Geospatial; the blogs which simply link to each other without providing any original content.

I just love Greasemonkey. The simplicity of how it works just amazes me. If you’ve wanted to filter out some feeds on the Planet Geospatial site, now its as easy as using Firefox and Greasemonkey.

Link – GIS Day

Well GIS Day is upon us and I’m going to spend it up in the High Desert of California visiting some clients. Hopefully some of you will find some time to visit a local GIS Day event in your area.