Quick Hits from the ESRI Dev Summit

It's early on day two of the ESRI Dev Summit in Palm Springs. First off, are your NCAA brackets looking? I'm sitting right at the 80th percentile in Yahoo, a solid B-...

A few quick notes from yesterday:

AM Keynote

• Not an overwhelming success, but not a dud either. The start was a bit awkward, as if because it's the first year for this, ESRI themselves didn't know how to kick things off. I'm glad that they basically jumped right in.
• Scott Morehouse talked about how ArcGIS is architected. He focused a lot on frameworks. I focused on the fact that as a former ESRI employee I used to get paid to hear Scott talk, but now as a conference attendee, I'm the one paying.
• About a 1/2 hour into the session, I took a look around the room and thought to myself that there were a lot of people there. I don't know, 600-700 people perhaps?
• ESRI announced that 9.2 will support a type of non-versioned, short transaction geodatabase editing model. This to meet the needs of a lot of users that can't embrace long transactions and versioning for a variety of reasons.
• ESRI is the geodatabase. Really, this is the first fucntional area that Scott dove into detail on yesterday, and I've also noticed that it's the one area of the software that has something substantially new each release of ArcGIS.
• About 1 hour into the session I took a look around the room and thought to myself that there were a lot of us males in the audience.
• I noticed some new faces on the stage, and some new roles. Clint Brown talked about the geodatabase, and ESRI are now calling their product specialists 'product engineers'.
• ESRI was definitely pushing geoprocessing. It was used as example of how to reuse components from different types of ArcGIS deployments (desktop, engine, server).
• ESRI demo'd a lot of what's coming in 9.2. I noticed that the audience wasn't really applauding at all after the demos, up until when Ishmael demo'd ArcGIS Explorer. I think ESRI saved the best for last with this. I thought that his demos were pretty interesting, and with the crowd applauding, I think that they agreed with me.
• I came away from the session wondering how many people 'get' all of the various deployment possibilities with ArcGIS. I know that I'm a little bit dizzied by all the options. I was also excited to see the PM session where they'd be demoing the new Flash stuff.

Technical Sessions

• I attended Al LaFramboise's session on developing components that work in different ArcGIS products (desktop/engine/server). Things started kind of slowly for my taste, but as he got rolling, I think he did a really good job showing by example how you might develop components once and reused them across different types of ArcGIS deployments. As he said, even if you're only developing for desktop now, your app may move to the web at some point in the future, so you might want to accomodate for this in your architecture now.
• At the lunchtime .NET SIG meeting, ESRI showed off their .NET IDE integration tools. These are built for VS 2005 and will be released at the same time as ArcGIS 9.2 (at least this is how I understand it). The tools looked pretty powerful. I'm running the express version of VS 2005 currently, and I might think about upgrading just to be able to run the ESRI integration tools... There was at least one comment from the back of the room wondering why ESRI can't officially support VS 2005 now, instead of waiting for ArcGIS 9.2 to do this...
• Next, I saw Andrea and Mansour talked about ArcWeb Services. I came in not knowing much about this product, and really I was there to see the Flash/SVG support that ESRI is adding. I came away really interested the AWS product actually. It offers an easy way to build applications that use data and services (like routing, spatial selection, location) hosted by ESRI. Clients pay for it based on the number of hits they take. Mansour demo'd the new Flash (support?). I definitely gave him a A for enthusiasm and he was able to show some really cool stuff. I saw online Flash map apps writing using Java Script hitting AWS. he was even able to mash in content from other online sources. ......Very cool. I don't know that much about this technology, but I do know that Flash can be used to create maps and interactive web apps with very 'clean' looks. I find it compelling to be able to more easily create flash content out of a GIS database.
• Lastly, I saw Mike Shaw, Fred Aubry, and Milosz give a really informative and entertaining presentatioon of the new .NET Mobile ADF. This is part of the ArcGIS Server product (thus also available to developers with an EDN subscription). Basically, they built a library that helps you build apps that work on smart clients like tablet pcs, pdas, and mobile phones that are only intermittently connected to a network. I got a lot out of this talk, and later in the evening I talked to E-911 application developer that was really interested in using this as part of his new product.

So, on to Day 2. Don't worry, I'll get back to my carto critique of Google and Ask.Com maps after the dev summit buzz settles a bit.

Talk to you soon,

-Cory