ArcGIS 9.3.1 users current on maintenance can now request the ESRI Data & Maps 2009 Update here:

http://www.esri.com/data/data-maps/latest_update.html

Hope this helps!

This thread on the Google Maps API for Flash Group Forum caught my attention yesterday:

• Pure AS3 setup of Google map via Flash Develop

The author outlines the steps required to get FlashDevelop up and running with the Google Maps API for Flash. FlashDevelop is a free and open source IDE with code completion for ActionScript, MXML, XML, and HTML.

It provides a compelling alternative to FlexBuilder and is worth a look. Please donate to the project if you use it!

I followed the steps outlined in the thread and everything worked as described. Here are a few extra details that might be useful:

• The FlashDevelop home page is www.flashdevelop.org
• I had to download and install the Java Runtime Environment before installing FlashDevelop.
• When installing the Flex SDK, place it in C:\Program Files\FlashDevelop\Tools\flexsdk for automatic configuration
• If you don’t already have the Flash Debug Player, download and install the latest version from Adobe

Hope this helps!

Overview

I’ve been looking at the Bing Maps (Virtual Earth) Silverlight Map Control and thinking about how to use it in a Silverlight application that implements the Model-View-ViewModel pattern. If you’re not familiar with this pattern, check out Shawn Wildermuth’s MSDN Article Model-View-ViewModel in Silverlight 2 Apps.

I’ve created a simple proof of concept application that implements the pattern with two Views: a Map based View and a Data Grid based View. The application displays a map of well known surf spots in the Los Angeles area, along with some basic information about each spot in an accompanying data grid.

Read More...

Overview

ArcSDE Spatial Views are a useful tool for organizing information from multiple feature classes and geodatabase tables into a single “virtual feature class” or table at the database level. Similar to a database view, they allow administrators to join commonly used information so that the users do not need to perform the same actions repeatedly in a client (in this case, ArcMap).

Spatial Views are created with the “sdetable –o create_view …” command. When creating a Spatial View in this manner, the default join type is INNER JOIN. This fact cannot be altered via the command line syntax. INNER JOIN is the most restrictive join type and only records that match on both sides of the join will be in the resulting view. But once a default INNER JOIN Spatial View has been created, the join type can be changed after the fact either with the ALTER VIEW SQL statement, or through a database administration tool.

This article demonstrates how to create a Spatial View and then change the join type using SQL Server Management Studio. The same principles can be applied to other databases using whatever management tool you have available. Read More...

Overview

This is the third post in a series where I discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash. The first and second posts presented and refined an example that demonstrated how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. This post demonstrates how to display an ArcGIS Server cached tile layer as a custom map type with the Google Maps API for Flash.

Sample Application Concepts

The sample application works as follows:

• The Google Maps API for Flash is embedded in a Flex 3 application.
• A cached tile layer representing Land Base features for Portland, Oregon is served via an ArcGIS Server Map Service, accessible via ArcGIS Server’s REST API.
• The cached tile layer appears as a custom map type in the Google Maps API for Flash User Interface.
• The cached tile layer is displayed at zoom levels 0 - 19.

Here are a couple of screen shots of the sample application. The first shows the application with the custom “Land Base” map type selected. The second shows the application with the normal map type selected.

Live example is here, and source code is here. Read More...

Overview

When working with the Find Address Task in the ArcGIS Server WebADF, the default zoom scale that is displayed when the user zooms to a found address might not be what you want. This article discusses how to change it using the ZoomToPointFactor property. Read More...

Overview

This is the second post in a series where I discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash. If you haven’t read the first post yet, I encourage you to do so now.

The first post presented a simple example that demonstrated how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. In this second post, we will reorganize the code for better reusability and add some geocoding functionality.

I’ll keep this post pretty brief and only cover the major points. Feel free to check out the live example and dive into the source code! Read More...

Overview

This is the first post in a series where I will discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash.

With this post, we start with a simple example that demonstrates how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. In this case, we will be working with parcel data.

This first example serves to demonstrate the basic concepts as succinctly as possible. In future posts, I will gradually refactor and improve upon the code to create reusable components. Read More...

When programming with ArcObjects and ArcGIS Server, code often follows a common pattern of connecting to ArcGIS Server, getting hold of an IServerContext, doing some work, and releasing the context. This leads to a lot of unnecessarily repeated setup and teardown code, usually taking a form similar to the following example:

IServerContext context = null;

try

{

    IGISServerConnection conn = new GISServerConnectionClass()

        as IGISServerConnection;

 

    // Connect as ASPNET or NETWORK SERVICE.

    // Get optional host setting from web.config,

    // or use localhost if not found.

    string host = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["AGSHost"];

    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(host))

    {

        host = "localhost";

    }

 

    // Make connection

    conn.Connect(host);

    IServerObjectManager som = conn.ServerObjectManager;

    context = som.CreateServerContext("MyServer", "MapServer");

   

    // Do some stuff with the server context

}

finally

{

    if (context != null)

    {

        context.ReleaseContext();

    }

}

In this example, there is a lot of boilerplate happening just to get to the server context and do something interesting. Seeing this kind of code repeated throughout an ArcGIS Server project made me a little queasy as it violates the DRY Principle, so that got me thinking about how to eliminate it. Read More...

Background

I’m using Subversion (via VisualSVN Server) for source control. I recently decided to add daily offsite backup to my setup. This was relatively easy to accomplish with 7-zip, Dropbox, and a batch file.

VisualSVN Server is a free package that makes setting up and managing Subversion on Windows really easy. It includes Subversion, an Apache web server, and a GUI management console.

Dropbox is an easy to use online file storage and synchronization service. It’s free for accounts up to 2GB.

7-zip is a free, open source zip library that can be controlled from the command line. Read More...