8/5/2008
We've been working with our area's Economic Development
Council for the past few weeks. Their new website includes a variety of
mapping features, such as:
·
Commercial building and site searches
·
Identify business and industrial parks
·
View industry sector clusters
·
View workforce demographics
This new website is a great example of what is possible
using the Hybrid GIS platform of MapDotNet and Virtual Earth.
Stayed tuned for information
about our upcoming release which will include a WPF map renderer as well as WPF
and Silverlight map controls…
7/9/2008
We are working towards our 7.0 release. A lot of R & D has gone into it, and there are some very interesting results.
Some of the highlights of MapDotNet 7.0 are:
- a WPF map rendering engine
fast rendering, great looking maps, support for XAML based symbols
- Silverlight and WPF map controls
standardized API, open tile requestor interface,
many stock tile requestors (Virtual Earth, Open Layers, MapDotNet Server, etc.), and XAML customizability
- MapDotNet Studio, a.k.a. Expression Map
a WPF application that lets you create, symbolize, and publish interactive maps for your apps, and migrate data into or out of your spatial database
Here's a screenshot of MapDotNet Studio:
In this screen shot, I un-docked the layer properties window to show how you change symbologies while previewing the map. 5/30/2008
According to Microsoft’s white paper on Software + Services:
Software + Services, is an additive model that goes beyond packaged software to give customers increased flexibility and choice in deployment options, including on-premise, delivered over the Internet, or hybrid solutions or ―mashups that deliver the best of both worlds by combining hosted services with capabilities that can only be achieved by software running locally on a device
Find out why Hybrid GIS makes sense!
4/1/2008
Posted by Benton
As many are anticipating, this summer, the MapDotNet 7.0 product suite will come with 2 new controls in the developer SDK, a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) control and a Silverlight 2.0 control. What that means is that developers will now have the ability to build rich vertical smart client and web applications with Microsoft’s latest technologies for presentation.
This demonstrates integrating a MapDotNet Server with VE and Google Maps tile sources. Of course, if you have your own streets and aerial data (which many agencies and companies do) you can create your own base map tiles and serve them up to the Silverlight and WPF controls.
What can you expect from the new controls?
• Rich interactive user experience (much like the current consumer APIs minus all of the JavaScript!)
• Built for enterprise GIS application development (not just a consumer viz toy)
• Ability to perform temporal thematic mapping
• Ability to dynamically adjust symbology and see the results in real time
• More flexibility for spatial and non-spatial data visualization
3/10/2008
Posted by Benton
Today I am Seattle for the GITA conference which officially kicked off Saturday. Yesterday morning, I co-presented with Kevin Larson of Idea Integration and Nicole Jung of Global CADD System Corp on finding the right Spatial Database. For my portion of the presentation we investigated the factors of choosing the right spatial database for a Web 2.0 mapping applications. My talk centered on choosing a spatial database that was easy to administer and had high performance for tile cache rendering or on-the-fly tile generation for custom thematic data overlays on a consumer map service (Virtual Earth). I demoed two great MapDotNet Server examples doing each, http://neighborshoods.realtor.com (on-the-fly) and http://gis.miamigov.com/cityofmiamive/ (prerendered tile cache).
On the topic of tile generation, we feel that there will soon be a better method than bitmap tile overlays produced on-the-fly or pulled from a tile cache. Massive overlay tile caches will probably not be the best solution in the long term for two reasons. One because of the amount of disk space tile caches consume and two because of the amount of time it takes to populate them. On-the-fly tile generation on the server, while okay if you have a beefy server to run your rendering engine, isn’t the best approach for very dynamic thematic mapping. We feel that the future for consumer based GIS applications with thematic overlays will be a hybrid approach of pre-cached base map tiles and vector tile overlays! By vector overlays, I mean geometry and attribute records queried on-the-fly from the spatial database and rendered by the client application. We all know the current limitations of vector rendering using VML or SVG within an internet browser. What I am referring to is a client application built on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or Silverlight that would handle rendering in a more efficient manner than VML or SVG .
Don’t worry; tile caches are not going away. You’ll have to create tile caches for your base map imagery data and possibly for other fairly static data sets like street or water features. The vector rendering will allow for greater server capacity as processing is spread across clients and for dynamic thematic datasets like property parcels, zones or infrastructure data. Allowing user interaction results in rapid changes to the way data is presented.
At GITA today through Wednesday, I’ll be manning the Virtual Earth booth with the VE team, Vexcel and Idea Integration. Of course, I’ll be demoing the weather demo seen in my previous post and this new concept of vector based rendering in WPF. You can get a sneak peek by downloading it here:
Download demo of vector based tile overlays
Note: In order to run a WPF application you must have .NET 3.5 installed on your computer. Running the MapDotNet WPF Weather Demo setup.exe will prompt you to download and install .NET 3.5 or you may download it from the following: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=333325fd-ae52-4e35-b531-508d977d32a6&DisplayLang=en 2/28/2008
At the beginning of 2008, James Fee had a "prediction for the new year and it is that we'll have our minds blown away be all the new technology heading down the pike." At the time, we were rolling out the release of MapDotNet Server 6.5, and agreed with James that there would be some mind blowing technologies headed down the pike, knowing that MapDotNet would include a number of them.
The migration of the MapDotNet Server 6.5 web services from WSE 3.0 to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), although not mind blowing, laid the groundwork for us to align the MapDotNet product with Microsoft's strategy for .NET. What we knew would be mind blowing and was the next logical step following the WCF conversion were Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight 2.0 map controls!
With our new WPF and Silverlight 2.0 map controls, developers and designers will soon be able to build rich interactive mapping applications for the desktop and web. In our opinion, WPF and Silverlight 2.0 take giant leap forward from other user interface technologies such as Windows Forms, Java, Flash, JavaScript APIs and ActiveX controls.
Below is a link to our the first technology preview of our MapDotNet WPF control, it demonstrates the power of visualizing satellite and radar data from weather.com on Virtual Earth and Google base map tiles in a WPF application. This technology preview accesses tiles from different sources in a "RESTful" manner and animates the weather patterns over the past hour.
For those that are familiar with the MapDotNet product line, you'll know that this is just scratching the surface of the GIS capabilities mixed with a rich user experience. Over the next few weeks we will be releasing many more technology previews that show off the powerful cartographic analytical capabilities of MapDotNet combined with the rich interaction of WPF and Silverlight 2.0. Including, integration of large spatial datasets stored in SQL Server 2008, feature service rendering using WPF and more thematic mapping with time sequences.
Update: We've removed this demo due to the time change last month, it caused problems with the weather overlays. Please look for a similar Silverlight 2.0 version soon.
11/15/2007
The latest news I have, direct from the MapDotNet product team, is:
-A MapDotNet Server 6.5 release candidate will be available for internal testing by the end of November
-We don't have a date for the final release to market, but it will be weeks, not months, after the release candidate is made available to our internal dev teams
-MapDotNet Server 6.5 will include support for SQL Server 2008 in all of our web services; this means that MDNS will be providing the following capabilities:
- Map definition and symbology configuration of SQL Server 2008 based map layers via the MDNS Admin service
- Map image services that can include SQL Server 2008 based map layers (as well as other layer types) via the MDNS Map service
- Spatial query capabilities, fully supported by the MDNS class library, via the MDNS Feature service
- Spatial feature update support via the MDNS FeatureEdit service
- The ability to serve a WMS that includes map layers derived from SQL Server 2008 tables
-The product team has completed extensive performance testing of SQL Server 2008 and has found the performance to be on par with the performance we see when working with PostGIS--which means it appears to perform extremely well(DISCLAIMER: The performance of spatial databases is subject to a wide array of variables, so your results may vary)
-MDNS 6.5 is going to include a few other very important new features and upgrades, so stay tuned to learn more... 10/30/2007
Last week a few of us attended and exhibited our goods at the GEOINT 2007 conference in San Antonio. We were hosted in the Microsoft Virtual Earth booth along with a handful of other Microsoft Partners.
We were showing off a preview of our upcoming support in MapDotNet Server for Virtual Earth 6.0. That preview application is now online and available for you to check out here: Virtual Harris County. It features Bird's Eye views in 3D.
I was particularly glad to spend some time with Ed Katibah, the Spatial Program Manager for the Microsoft SQL Server team. If you don't know this yet, SQL Server 2008 will include spatial data storage and query capabilities. Everyone at ISC is real excited about it, and we're going to be supporting it as soon as we can after the November CTP is out. Ed is an understated fellow that really knows his GIS technology backwards and forwards.
We were in between IDV Solutions and Idea Integration, both of whom were showing off real cool stuff. IDV was presenting their SharePoint dashboard concept using VE, a great looking, easy to use application. A developer from Idea was there showing an airplane flight path model built in VE 3D. Wow! He can load up GPS coordinates and a model of a jumbo jet moves through 3D automatically. Another Microsoft partner, Thetus Corp, gave me a walkthrough of their knowledge modeling and discovery software. Quite sophisticated!
I saw a lot of advanced GIS and mapping technology, but I was glad to see that MapDotNet Server was a unique product in the midst of all the rest. I am a bit surprised that I didn't see a single ArcGIS™-based application. No ArcIMS™, no ArcGIS Server™, and no MapObjects™ or ArcObjects™ that I could tell. Of course, we were showing some of our apps that hit ArcSDE™ databases, and I didn't linger at the ESRI™ booth. Things are definitely changing in the GIS world!!! 9/7/2007I read a couple of nice blogs this morning from James Fee and Nate Irwin...
http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2007/09/06/mapdotnet-server-2007-612-released/
http://www.nateirwin.net/MapDotNetServer2007612ReleasedAlongWithBetterDocumentation.aspx
One thing caught my attention: Nate's statement about being pleased with our philosophy of "release early, release often." What's ironic is there has been a lot of discussion around the office about this very notion. Some here are concerned if you release too frequently it sends the wrong message to our customers..."must have a lot of issues if they have to release again so soon..."
I would say our philosophy is more along the lines of: "release frequently if it the ROI is high and it does not impose a migration penalty on existing solutions." Another area of focus is performance and stability. We are more likely to release an update if it improves existing functionality rather than to just get the latest bell and whistle out there (of course our developers love to make bells and whistles.)
It reminds me of Symantec when they released Visual Cafe' right at the beginning of the Java revolution. We were an early adopter at ISC. Unfortunately for them, they focused so much on new features they could never get the product stable...and you know how that story ended. We are not inclined to repeat that approach. 8/9/2007
RESTful design is hot topic. So hot, RPC must be on the way out and Microsoft's WCF is soon to be "WCF Classic." Okay, doubtful, but REST certainly has some interesting advantages.
But what about REST in geospatial services in an SOA? Let's face it, the last thing you need to worry about when rendering complex maps and tiles is the SOAP packaging overhead. When profiling our 6.1 MapDotNet Server map rendering service, very little time is spent on communication overhead. This doesn't appear to be a good candidate for a RESTful service - at least not from a performance concern. Same goes for querying and editing spatial information via a web service. Of course there are other reasons for considering REST.
Once caching enters the picture, REST starts to look more promising. Tiles URI-organized by quad-key seems to make sense and is basically the way Microsoft provides its tiles to a Virtual Earth client. Map and geometry caches organized in quadrants should consider REST.
In MapDotNet Server 6.5 we are embracing WCF and will continue to support our WSE3 versions of our rendering and spatial querying and editing services. Architecturally this is not a problem because the communication layers are thin, residing on top of our core services. As support for REST on WCF ( Microsoft Astoria) evolves, it will be fairly trivial for us to add a RESTful version of our services. | Edit in Browser | /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif | /MDNBlog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XsnLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xsn | 255 | | Edit in Browser | /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif | /MDNBlog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser | 0x0 | 0x1 | ProgId | InfoPath.Document | 255 | | Edit in Browser | /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif | /MDNBlog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser | 0x0 | 0x1 | ProgId | InfoPath.Document.2 | 255 | | Edit in Browser | /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif | /MDNBlog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser | 0x0 | 0x1 | ProgId | InfoPath.Document.3 | 255 | | Edit in Browser | /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif | /MDNBlog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser | 0x0 | 0x1 | ProgId | InfoPath.Document.4 | 255 | | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /MDNBlog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 255 | | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /MDNBlog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 255 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /MDNBlog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 256 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /MDNBlog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 256 |
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