Success! - 1st .NET-MySql-ArcObjects project

Hurray! My 1st attempt at integrating data from a MySql database into a .NET & ArcObjects application worked. It's pretty rough and only for internal use at this point. It was much easier than I expected.

The data comes from a PHP based web app that I wrote to help us manage our large number of Breeding Bird Census counts that we do. For the last 6 years all survey data was reported on an excel spreadsheet with an accompaning word document describing survey stations and conditions. There was no connection between any of this data and it was a terrible pain to anylise the data if we wanted to. The database & web app have made it a very simple task to enter the observations & quickly produce a report without having to enter the same thing several times on servral different documents.

The only problem left to be solved was the best way to get new or changed station coordinates out of the MySql database and onto the clients map. First, I tried just writing a comma delimited test file and having people "Add X&Y Data". However, it was really too many steps for this to work well for my users. Then I made an ASP.NET app which worked great on my computer but had all sorts of problems when we put it on our webhost. Turns out they were running .NET 1.1 and I wrote it in Net 2.0. So I was now serveral days behind on getting this tool out to people and decided on a very simple and quick desktop client application. I used VS2005, which seemed to do fine with MySql in the dataset designer and other fancy feature parts. But whenever it lost connection with the DB for any reason, it crashed VS and forgot about the dataset and threw errors like crazy when you started the project up again. So I finnally had to simplify even more and just program the automattic creation of the dataset and data tables into the code. Once I got VS to play nice with MySql the rest of it was very easy. I just re-used the "create empty shapefile" code I got from the an ESRI KB article a while back and populated it with my points.

 

I know it's not much but, it was a good day for me to have that work. After banging my head against the wall on several other projects, it was nice to have the 1st published instance of a program integrating 3 things I had never tried to integrate before work correctly and in a bug-free way.

Introduction

 

I'm a wildlife biologist with a MS in Rangeland Ecology & a BS in Wildlife Ecology. I've had a life long passion for computers and all the wonderful things they did and toyed with the idea of being a computer science major. I've been a extreme power user of most DOS & Windows programs for over 15 years & ESRI's GIS programs for 10 years. Last year I finally got burnt out on pure wildlife consulting. I decided to start doing more with my high-level use of programs to better analyze our business and make routine tasks more efficeint. I started using VBScript & VBA quite a bit and realized how much I had missed writing programs. At the same time, I was (still am) moonlighting as a GIS consultant. One of my clients has me working on a very large multi-county project that he would like to sell access to. He is using it on his laptop & blowing people away with the high quality maps and rapid data access to many things that used to take weeks to get together. These 2 forces have come together to propel me into programming and developing tools for my employer and clients nearly full time. I started this blog because, I simply don't have anywhere else to share my truimphs & defeats. None of my colleauges even come close to understanding exactly what it is I do and I think my GIS consulting clients think I just kind of wave a magic wand and cool new things suddenly appear. None of my friends have any interest or real knowledge of what I do so I needed a place to vent & occasionally celebrate, and here it is.