Dev Summit 2008 is now over and done. Great to see so many old friends and meet tons of new ones. This conference is "the" event for developers working with the ESRI product line, so if you could not make it this year, start working on your managers now to get approval for next year.

One idea that ESRI threw out at the closing session was the idea of running another "track" that would be technical sessions presented by users. I think this would be awesome (and not just because I'd love to give a talk!). I briefly talked with them after the Q&A session was over and the idea would be that the developers would be able to submit some sort of a description of the presentation, and then the rest of the community would vote for the sessions they want to see. This would be fantastic. If this sounds like a good idea... um... yeah. I just looked for a link on EDN to send feedback (about something other than the site itself), but did not find anything that looked suitable. Just leave a comment, and I'll find out the best way to push that back to ESRI.

While decompressing on the lawn outside the conference center, it occurred to me that having some other smaller, focused, but really technical events at other times during the year would be a great addition to the Dev Summit. Sure they could not drag the dev teams all over the place (someone has to work on 9.4!) but maybe bring some folks from tech support / professional services? Just an idea...

A quick note on my posts from this week - they were just the notes, as I typed them during the sessions, and I hope that was useful for those who could not make it out here. If something was particularly cryptic, shoot me an email, and I'll see if I can figure out what I meant.

It's been a fun week, and thanks to everyone at ESRI for putting on a consistently excellent event. See you next year!

I don't have the WEP key yet... so not on the fly updates... This is just a dump of notes taken on the fly - I'll be talking to people later and getting more details on a lot of this. I'm really looking at the REST stuff, so if you have specific questions, drop them in the comments and I'll see what I can do to get an answer...

Plenary Intro...

ESRI using Coverity for static analysis - lots of bugs fixed as a result. Lots of hype for Coverity.

Resource center being expanded from ArcExplorer to the entire line.

ArcGIS Server

Ismael Chivite - AGS Product Manager

<koolaid>

• "Making GIS knowlege available on the web"
• "Complete Server GIS"
• "Core Services"
• "Replication and Federated GIS Systems"
• "Out of the box applications access core services"
• "Use Google or Microsoft Virtual Earth to connect to the Services"

</koolaid>

Performance Improvments

What we've heard before - partial caching, on demand caching.  Nothing about improved performance for creating the caches

Web apps - lots of effort in improving the .NET ADF. Less round trips to the server. Built on MS Ajax.

AGS Image Service = Image Server, with smoother publishing workflow. Drag and drop raster in Catalog to publish it. Nothing on how you setup the overviews, so maybe that's automated with defaults.

Security - many more options - ASP.NET membership is an option, and you can implement your own provider.

Developer Center Resource Center - portalized content, but do they have good search? Also have web services that can be included for free (interesting - wonder what the TOS are on this?)

Apparently lots more content, better organized help. Will there be any FooClass.DoThing() --> Does a thing API documentation

Code Gallery - more tasks etc will be incrementally released. Nice touch. Will include source code. Will there be stuff beyond "tasks"? The community will also be able to upload code - nice.

Rex Hansen Demo

Using the Resource Center to find info on the Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax framework. Many samples - showed a Partial Postback sample. Personally I'm more into using the lower level ASP.NET Client library with JSON Services than the update panel, but that's just me. Moved to creating a custom web part, that can then be pushed into SharePoint. Points pulled from a CRM (unclear on how they are linked), with a ArcGIS Online Street map. I'll be playing with this to see how the cascade performs - i.e. does the client make the street map request directly to ESRI, or does the Server do it? What's the lag time? Are the points geometry in the browser a la VEShape?

Rex also talked about the Java ADF...  did some editing tasks - attributes shown in a pop-up instead. Not sure if it was for simplicity but the demo showed changing a building permit type - defined as a text field - wouldn't this be a Domain? Maybe the domain pull downs are not cooked yet? Or this is just a very simple demo...

Javascript and REST API

This is one of the few areas with "NEW" functionality. Can you say Mashups? Ismael compared Javascript to Avenue or Python... "it's very easy to create applications with the javascript API"... um yeah. It's just object based Javascript, REST, JSON, angle brackets, and CSS but it's very easy. "Easier" - maybe, "easy" - only if you've already cut your teeth in these technologies.

Jeremy Bartley Demo

No web server licensing for any of the REST/Javascript API's. This is great news.

Interactive site for the Javascript API, with line by line review of the sample apps. Showed the simple markup for the "basic map". Very VE like in terms of setting up a map. Nice looking API with clean documentation - I will likely be spending quite a bit of time here. Also a community area.

Samples - lots of them covering all(?) aspects of the API. All samples use ESRI services, so they are easy to get up and running locally. Nice.

Talked briefly about using the geometry service. Looked like a couple of round trips, but seems very fast.

Geoprocessing task - summarize population within a geometry - pretty simple. There is a GP Explorer that lets developers poke around on a server - includes an image of the model (shudder). Pass arguments into the service as JSON, so should be interesting.

Nice demo using the Dojo Chart API. All rendered on the client. Very sweet.

Google Maps and Virtual Earth Integration

Nice demo that takes a Google Route, and generates a profile.

Virtual Earth sample that gets hurricane tracks, and draws them on the map (not clear where the tracks came from) but they were then passed to a GP service to buffer them. Are the extenders capable of taking VEShapes directly and shooting them to the GP Task?

<koolaid>

"I have not met anyone who could not create a map application in 15 minutes" - Ismael

</koolaid>

Mobile ADF

Pretty cool stuff, and I hope to get into this. I'm sure there are improvements, but not having done more than a very very simple prototype back in the 9.2 beta, I'm not really one to say much on this.

One thing of note - there was a demo that showed a "workflow driven" application. Hurray! It's not always all about the map! This is what a lot of people need to understand - just because you can show stuff on a map, does not mean that it's the best way to interact with the an application. Very nice.

ArcEngine & Desktop Review (fast and furious by Euan)

More editing options - SQL Server express mentioned, but thin on details. More "use GP" talk. Better API documentation, better indexing of the documentation. Eclipse add-in for better java debugging.

Desktop has some Z-Value editing (??) HTML popup window in desktop for simplified identify type functions. VBA 6.5 will be in final, to make things easier to deploy on Vista and interop with MSOffice

Error report demo - ESRI will provide debug symbol servers. Helps with sleuthing "random crashes"

ArcGIS Explorer

Rapid evolution, releases every few months. Version Neutral (not tied to the rest of the ArcObjects API), local and remote data support.

New symbols in build 450 will also be in 9.3 - basically some prettier icons. Ability to control the look of the attribute popup via CSS. Ability to add Google 3D warehouse via KMZ/KML. Nice demo showing Youtube video integration, live-traffic cams etc. Nice, and really just catching up to Google Earth.

Tasks is where things diverge from Google Earth. More pre-cooked tasks available online. GeoNames.org demo piping one task into another task. Focusing on integration and... yep... mashups.

User Showcase for community tasks. Looks like ArcScripts' days are numbered.

I'm going to have to play with Explorer more - looks like you can do a lot of stuff. Nice demo of vertical slicing.

Future builds will have multi-thread tile fetching, easier task updating (push? version check/update?)

Even further out - more Ux updates, integrated 2D and 3D support. Markup and collaboration (sweet), and developers can use the 2D and 3D controls in our own apps! Woot!

Andy MacDonald showed off a "build 600" version with a Ribbon UI - context driven UI like office. Nice basemap "gallery" integration directly into the UI (instead of opening a browser first). Flyout/self-docking windows. I think this is later this year?

Explorer SDK...

Available with Build 600 & 700. Map Control. Sweet. Super Sweet. It's certainly not a MapObjects replacement, but it sure is nice. API has been expanded - easier to use - lots of overloaded constructors. Less "interface" driven API - easier API exploration via intellisense. More helper methods to simplify verbose tasks. Collections now support enumerations so looping is smoother. Licensing?

Scott Moorehouse Big Picture

"Web is now the center of ArcGIS."

At 9.3 the focus was on finishing concepts introduced at 9.2. "Federated" - everyone take a sip. Web = Easy to Use. Get things done. ArcGIS is part of a broader community of products - i.e. we'll play nice with other stuff.

9.4 will be an incremental release. Nothing crazy new. Will be modularizing more aspects of the platform, which will allow ADF's and Web APIs will have faster release cycles. Also more Linux support. Complete re-write of the dynamic map engine (sounds like new rendering engine for better performance?) for server. Silverlight SDK coming. More Geodatabase APIs, better web APIs for GDB transactions.

Wow this is long session...

EDN Community - Jim Barry

Growing online resources. Team has been expanded. Little bit of "ESRI and You lovefest". ESRI has blogs. woot. Apparently there will be more blogs. woot. Forums *may* be updated. They had some new better forums during the 9.2 beta, but apparently that did not go anywhere. Jim asked for feed back on the forums so here goes:

If nothing else, add RSS feeds into the forums. 

 

Although I missed the first few minutes, no mention of "author publish consume"... wonder if that's because this audience may be a little more skeptical of the three-clicks to greatness story line.

Found the WEP key, so more updates later...

James pointed out that there are some Dev Summit slide decks have been posted. This is great as it can help you figure out which sessions to prioritize attending. It's a pretty hectic few days so making sure you're getting the most out of the sessions is huge.

Here are a few interesting sessions that have slide decks:

Building .NET Applications Using the ArcGIS Server Web ADF and ASP.NET AJAX

Implementing and Optimizing ArcGIS Server Map Caches

Architecting ArcGIS Server Solutions for Performance and Scalability

Leveraging the OGC Capabilities of ArcGIS Server

There is no "master list", but poke around the agenda and you'll find that there are quite a few there (No the REST API is not up yet!)

So I just went to vote for the ESRI Code Challenge only to find that the voting ended yesterday! Doh!

Oh well - I hope *someone* voted for the AGS 9.2 Tile Server

Just got the notice in via email - wow.

I may have to polish up that adaptive cache code!

Where did April go? Anyhow - I'm finally getting my head above water, and was catching up on my blog reading when I noticed that James posted a link to the podcast interview I recorded at the 2007 ESRI Developer summit.

For those interested, here is a direct link to the MP3. And kudos to whoever edited it, since it sounds much more coherent than I recall!

I'm thinking the next few weeks will be some what sane, and I've got a few blog posts started, so things should be back to normal shortly.

First, Rob Elkins posted that the slides from the technical sessions are up on the EDN site. This is great news, as (unlike some people) I did not take photos of each slide in each session. I just wanted to add a kudos to the ESRI team for getting these up and available so quickly - I actually remember which presentations I wanted to review!

Second - a shout out to James Fee for fixing up PlanetGeospatial - the beta site is actually handling blogger feeds - no more "tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485601.post-6117499263807661458", images are inlined, and it looks a whole lot nicer. Hopefully this carries over to the RSS feed as well. Thanks James!

Made it back to Colorado today, and finally got some time to post a little more about the Dev Summit. Unfortunately we scheduled out flight home at 1:00pm, and could not hit the closing session, so I hope to read other peoples thoughts on that.

Overall, it was a great conference. One thing that I think went over really well was the choice to focus the sessions on 9.2. As with last year, the chance to meet with so many of the ESRI team members and other developers to discuss various development strategies is incredibly valuable. Even with twice the number of attendees, it is certainly the event of the year for ESRI developers.

There are only two suggestions I'd make for next year:

Session Scheduling
Session scheduling is always really difficult, but many of the "Deep Dive" sessions were slotted at the same time. I can see this organization working for people following "tracks", but I work with  pretty much the entire product line, and there were many sessions that I wanted to attend that I could not. At least the slide decks will be put up on EDN.

Down Time
The sessions were stacked up all day long, with tons of great content, but there were other things going on at the same time - Meet the Teams, Tech Talks, blogging, trying out what you just heard, and just talking with people.

I'd like to see the Dev Summit extended by at least a day - with more repeat sessions on the deep dive topics. This would make the decision to skip a session to meet the team a little easier - you would have a chance to hit a repeat the next day.

.NET SIG Presentation
Thanks to Art Haddad for giving me the opportunity to talk at this meeting. From the feedback I got after the talk, and postings on other sites, it sounds like people enjoyed it. As promised, I've uploaded the presentation. If you have any questions about the presentation, use the Contact link at the top of the page.

Download Powerpoint (includes notes)

Thanks to the entire team at ESRI who put these conferences together and make them the great events the are. See you all at the User Conference!

Just some notes from the Plenary Session that I thought I'd share...

 

Jim McKinney

Service packs will start including additional functionality as a means to ship updates prior to major releases. Mainly focused on ArcGIS Server

 

Scott Moorehouse - ESRI Architecture

Mainly a review of the overall ArcGIS software architecture - pretty high level stuff. The section on "new" stuff

- mentioned top priority for bugs and documentation.

-planned overhauls to the ArcGIS Desktop UI ("ribbons" - not stated specifically, but I'd guess this is really a WPF / AXML update to the UI) 

- overhaul code components: geodatabase, mapping, graphics

- and the usual "we will improve ArcGIS Online"

Currently two development tracks

- 9.3 Service packs will add functionality - specifically mentioned

• more OGC support
• PostgreSQL support
• More work in the Web ADF
• "google maps"-like Javascript API based on MS AJAX
• Vista support for Desktop

- 10.x focus on core changes

• 64bit support
• multi-threading support for multi-core chips (specifically geoprocessing and display)
• additional coarse grained objects
• updated graphics engines
• performance improvements in Geoprocessing framework
• open API for the file geodatabase
• Adding metadata catalog into the geodatabase (searchable, tagable)

Conceptual architecture will remain the same, mainly a modernization of the codebase.

 

Dave Wraizen - ArcGIS Server

Promoted the ArcGIS Server Team blog. Rumor has it that there will be more teams blogging shortly.

Also talked about their "big idea" pattern: Author, Serve & Use

The demo was pretty standard - author a map in ArcMap & GP Model, publish them into server, create a default web app, and then customize the app in Visual Studio to add some MapTips (on point features).

Task Framework touted as a good extension point - not sure I agree, but would be good if you just want to add simple functions into the out-of-the-box type of system. However, I'm thinking that for larger, more custom applications, the task framework is likely a little to coarse grained.

Enterprise Integration Demo

This was the SOA/ESB drag & drop BPEL love fest. I'm sorry, but I'm not really convinced that the resulting "agility" of this architecure is worth the expense , complexity and performance penalty (serialized/deserialize all over the place). If you have an enterprise big enough to support the cost, I'm guessing that most of your business processes are relatively static at the coarse grained level. What's more likely to change are smaller variations, which will usually require a low level change in the code. Conceptually interesting, but I'm just not "feeling" it yet.

 

Mobile Demo

Drag & Drop development demo with the Mobile ADF - quite cool. Personally, I think the Mobile ADF is pretty under rated, and hopefully we'll see more people using this in place of MapObjects type applications.

 

ArcGIS Explorer Demo

Exposure of Tasks - loading an excel spreadsheets of addresses on the client side. the E2API is lean, but powerful. Can use a standard user control and parent that into the Task Center arae in the Explorer Interface. Tasks are spawned into separate threads in the Explorer. They hide the threading for you. They have also created an automated task installer - you basically specify a download location in an Xml file.

 

Running out of battery power, I'll post more on the technical sessions later.

I was thinking that there would be some more details posted at the Dev Summit site about the SIG meetings, but apparenly this is it...

.NET Special Interest Group—Art Haddad
Primrose B
Come join us as we discuss .NET Development with ArcGIS 9.2. Learn what people are doing with .NET and GIS. Let us know what you would like to see the .NET teams do to help you develop your applications and anything else of interest. Help us grow the community of .NET developers by sharing your ideas.

 
Art Haddad asked me to give a talk at this years .NET SIG - The theme of the meeting is "Agile Processes", and I'll be talking about changes we made to our coding practices to enable us to be more adaptive and allow our codebase to be more "change-tolerant". Here's the opening slide...

As an aside, over the last 6 months or so, I've seen a few really good presentations (via google video) by top tier presenters. These two by Seth Godin and Lawrance Lessig specifically stick out. I though that for this one (since it's not a for a client), I'd try some of the techniques used by those guys and discussed over at PresentationZen.com. If you come to the SIG, I'd love to hear what you think of it.
 
The meeting is Wednesday from 12:00 to 1:30 in the "Primrose B" room. Hope to see you there!

Just a quick reminder before we all head off to Palm Springs - the Dev Summit Blogger Meetup will be:

Monday night, at 7:00pm in the Wyndham Hotel Bar.

So when they kick you out of the Solutions Expo, ESRI Showcase, or Community center, go out the doors, walk past the Wyndham pool and into the bar (it's basically in the hotel lobby). We'll be waiting.


To make the actual "Meet-Up" part of the meetup easier, I thought I'd throw up a relatively recent photo of myself in case we've never met - whether you make it to the meetup or not, be sure to say hello if you see me wandering around.

ESRI has posted a PDF with summary stats of the Dev Summit pre-conference survey results. I think it's very cool that they have released this information, and there are a few interesting nuggets in there...

Importance of Blogs as a Resource

I find this pretty suprising, since I believe that if you asked the same question to the much broader .NET developer community, blogs would be in the top 5 - mainly because of the positive impact that the Microsoft developer blogs have had. Since 97% of respondents said that "Developer Resources" are important, I believe that this result simply reflects slow adoption within the GIS community.  Despite this result, I hope that ESRI increases blogging by the product teams and professional services.


Developer Technologies


Three things stand out on this one...

ASP.NET Supremacy
ASP.NET seems to be pretty important to almost 80% of the respondents. Since I'm pretty sure that there are still an awful lot of people writing code for desktop, it makes me think that there is a tight correlation between ArcGIS Server developers and a willingness to take on-line surveys.


Visual Basic 6 beats Python, Java....
This suprised me. I loved VB6 when it was the only tool we had to work with, but it's just so painful compared to using .NET - and the transition to VB.NET is about a smooth as can be - and you can get the Free Express Editions - why why why are you still writing VB6? (I can understand support & maintenance) The fact it beat out Python and Java makes me think that there are not many Python/Java/Perl etc. developers out there.

REST? What's a REST?
While this is still a fermenting concept, REST architecture is a great way to do simple "servicey" things. I'm glad that ESRI included it on the list, and I think it will move up as more people start grokking it.

Thought it would be fun to gather the various ESRI bloggers and blog readers for some face to face conversations and beers. The ESRI Showcase and Vendor Expo ends at 7:00pm, so let's meet up at about that time in the Wyndham bar (it's in the lobby for those who have not been there before).

See you all there!

I was just getting the details for our trip out to the Dev Summit, and I noticed that they added a little something new...

What's cool is that the community gets to vote on the entries - so it will be interesting to see what get's submitted.

Avoiding IP Issues
Before everyone starts submitting code, I'd recommend clearing your submission with whoever you report to. Some organizations can be very concerned about intellectual property, and many times the people who are the most concerned are the least knowlegable about what can be shared vs what is an actual "trade secret". Best be safe than sorry.

Damn - I just noticed that James posted about this! There is no getting ahead of him!

Despite my sometimes pointed postings regarding ESRI, here's a little something from the DevSummit site...

 

Just got the notice from ESRI that it's time to register for the Developer Summit!

Last year it was a great event - good technical info in the sessions and a chance to talk to the developmen teams, other bloggers and other developers. I'm planning on going, and brining my project leads along as well.

Last year there were "Birds of a Feather" talks which were informal meetings, setup by attendees, on various topics. Last year I informally led a session on unit testing with ArcObjects, which drew a much larger crowd than I anticipated. (see below - I expected nobody to show up!)

Assuming anyone is interested (and that they have these slots available again), I'll try to get another one setup for unit testing and a second one about code generation and the concept of an object based data access layer for the geodatabase, and using databinding with that.

If this sounds like a good idea (or if it sounds painfully boring) let me know in the comments.

Also - I think I've got the IE problems solved on this site, if I don't please let me know (or use FireFox!)

See you in Palm Springs!