From the Dev Summit – Thursday March 20, 2008
A few sessions were offered by the geodatabase team on the final day of the Dev Summit. Developing with Rasters in ArcGIS and Distributed Geodatabase Development were given in the morning, and the second offering of Effective Geodatabase Programming was given in the afternoon.
The raster session, given by Hong Xu, Joe Roubal, and Peng Gao, discussed typical developing programming patterns for creating raster centric applications. The main topics were: how to create and visualize your raster data, how to create custom geodata transformations, creating custom pixel filters, and how to use the new APIs in 9.3 to work with image services and WCS services.
Here are some sample slides from the presentation: the following slide shows how developers can create custom geodata transformations based on their own image formats and plug these into ArcGIS. This way their proprietary images can be used by ArcGIS.
The talk also looked into how developers can access image services (shown below) and WCS services to get a raster from the layer and use it for spatial analysis operations.
In the distributed data session Gary MacDougal and Khaled Hassen started with an overview of distributing data techniques before presenting the key elements of geodatabase replication and the replication API.
The following slide shows some common use cases for distributing geodatabases which can be accommodated through geodatabase replication.
As a sample of some of the code shown during the session, this next slide describes how a developer can extend replica creation through custom behavior.
After the morning presentations, Jim McKinney MCed the Closing Session while everyone was finishing a sit down lunch in the Oasis room. He went over some feedback from attendees of the conference, basically describing what people thought we did well and some things that could be done better. In raise-your-hand survey fashion Jim gathered some feedback in the room about conference specifics such as: The length of the conference, the time and length of sessions, session topics, should we offer “twilight sessions” (a handful of hardcore developers who crave night-time sessions raised their hands for this), should we have sessions based on a user track, etc…
The overall consensus was that we struck a sweet spot this year as far as the length of the conference, staffing, and session content. This was our biggest and probably our best Developer Summit so far.
From our teams perspective, we gathered a lot of useful information and feedback from users and felt as though we were able to help a lot of developers find answers to the questions that they had. Our Meet the Development Team session on Wednesday was a good indication of the value of personal interaction with the developer community.
Thanks to everyone that attended and to everyone that came to the Geodatabase Island to talk with the development team. We hope the Developer Summit was an interesting and beneficial experience for you - It certainly was for us.