From the Dev Summit - Monday March 17, 2008

Craig Gillgrass, Colin Zwicker, Jessica Parteno and James MacKay gave a pre-conference talk today at the Developer Summit in Palm Springs called the Developers Guide to the Geodatabase. The session covered an overview of the geodatabase, some best practices, and showed several demos of how to work with the geodatabase API.

The talk drew a decent crowd of about 300 and generated some great discussion. Craig had a healthy 100% joke bombing percentage that drew some muffled sympathy laughs.

I pulled some slides from their presentation to post up on the blog and give you an idea of what the talk was about. All of the slides from the Dev Summit presentations will be publicly available on EDN. The full PDF of this presentation can be found HERE.

The presentation went into detail on tips and tricks, best practices, object model diagrams, and suggested programming patterns when using the geodatabase API.

The presentation outline for the session was the following:

The slide below gives a decent overview of the datasets that can be stored within a geodatabase, as well as some example behavior that the geodatabase can implement to manage data validation and data integrity:

This sample code on the efficient use of FindField was one of many helpful developer hints and best practices that were discussed during the session:

The presenters also touched on several key object model diagrams; this one describes the feature class object model which you need to understand when creating feature classes with the geodatabase API.

This pre-conference seminar was a good way to touch base with developers before the official kick-off to the 2008 Developer Summit.