Thoughts on Dev Summit

Day 1 (for me) Tues, Mar 20

Due to airline maintance problems, I didn’t get to the Summit until after the Plenary session was over. So I can’t comment on that although several others can.

Rob Elkins – 1, 2, 4, 5
Dave Bouwman
The Steve0

General Thoughts

I was deeply disapointed with the 1st day of Tech Sessions that I attended. I figured that the Best Practices sessions would be general overviews, but the Deep Dives I attended weren’t very deep. This was probably made worse by the fact that they couldn’t get internet connections to work during the presentations. I should have followed James & Brian’s advice to just hang out in the Community Center and listen to Tech Talks and speak with the ESRI Devs themselves. The highlight of that day was getting to meet somany of the other geo bloggers and members of the ESRI team whose names I knew but had never seen or spoken to before.

Sessions Attended

Leveraging ArcWeb Services in GIS (Best Practices)

This was a nearly utter waste of time. They basically just walked through the docs, info & help from ArcWeb Services home page. This site is in fact far more informative than the talk was. The only truly interesting bit of info from this is that AWX v2 will be coming out later in the year. It is currently in alpha right now. This will allow direct connection to ArcGIS Server and possibly OGC web services.

Building AJAX-Based Web Apps with Server & .Net (Deep Dive)

Slight snorkel would have been appropiate. Again, you could learn as much and more from the SDK docs. The main take home message from this was that the out-of-the-box toolkit and base classes have ICallbackEvent handlers pre-cooked into them. Thus you don’t have to directly handle implementing the request & response callback functions in JavaScript. You just pass and recieve delimited text serializations. They delimited text was 30-40% faster than XML. JSON adds another 12-15% and will be directly supported soon (probably 9.3).

Deploying & Tuning ArcGIS Server / Leveraging GeoProces Framework in ArcGIS Engine .Net

The Server deployment was well attended and was also the subject of several very in depth Tech Talks. Grumblings about the licensing model and its pricing structure that actually discourges implementing the best practices models continue.

I caught the last half of the GP in Engine talk. That was rather interesting. Some compliants have been made about sending big tasks off to the GP only to have them fail or crash the coputer with no ryhme or reason. Appearently you can implement a listner that will talk to you about the status of your job as it is processing. That technique is not easily discoered through help docs.

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