On Oct 20^th, over 50 geo developers and managers came out to join us at the Dev Meet Up in Boise, Idaho.  The event was held at the Bardenay in downtown Boise.  Many of the attendees were from local government agencies but there were also a number of individuals from local and private businesses.  Overall it was a great crowd and the venue offered a great atmosphere to engage in “geo” conversation.

Keynote

Todd Buchanan kicked things off with a presentation on Regional GIS Application Development.  This was a very interactive talk that solicited feedback from the audience on how to improve application and data sharing across different agencies.  A number of pain points were also covered.  This sparked a lot of conversation and interest in things like data and application standards, maintenance and ownership.  We get the feeling this topic will come up again.

From there, the lightning talks unfolded.

Lightning Talks

Zach Maillard from the Idaho Department of Water Resources opened with an excellent discussion on flood hazard web mapping using ASP.NET MVC and the ArcGIS JavaScript API.  The application generated a FEMA flood hazard map for different areas of the region.  The map could be exported as a PDF file so it could be printed or easily shared with others.  Zach described some of the benefits of using ASP.NET and MVC as a development framework, and how they separated the data and file resource logic from the map, UI and printing components.  The application also made use of REST so simple URLs could be used to access and consume information behind the scenes.

One of the great things about the format of these events is that we can adjust the program as necessary, and when one of our lightning talk presenters didn’t make it, Kevin Jones offered to fill in at the last minute.

Kevin presented his dissertation on Open Layers and integration with different platforms.  This was an excellent talk, especially considering he didn’t prepare for it all!

Alan Rea from the USGS followed up with a presentation on how they used ArcGIS to build a web application to perform heavy back-end geoprocessing to generate stream stats across the country.  The system allowed users to visit an ungaged area and estimate stream flow statistics by using back-end raster and other regression analyses.  The scale of the system was impressive, using 17 servers to crunch gigabytes of data to generate the results.  One of the lessons learned was that they are now rewriting parts of the application to expose the server-side functionality via standard protocols (REST and SOAP). This will allow them to more easily integrate with newer client-side and RIA technologies.  Currently the system has been fully implemented across 22 states and 11 more are in the adoption process.

Bill Masters finished off with an excellent presentation on how he designed a vault/utility management application with Silverlight.  This was impressive because he stepped us through how he actually built the application by starting with some of the templates you can find on the ArcGIS.com Resource Centers and how, by stitching together other samples, he was able to build a simple and interactive application to access his data through ArcGIS Server.  One of the challenges he was able to overcome was displaying data in an Access GDB along with a number of associated related tables.  Very impressive as this was his first Silverlight application!

Hot Topics

• Standardizing applications and data
• Building web apps with JavaScript vs Silverlight/Flex
• Moving web apps to mobile
• Migrating to ArcGIS 10
• ArcGIS Server SIG group for Idaho?
• When is the next meet up?

Staying Connected!

One of the great things about these events is that you really get a chance to connect and share information with others in the local community. 

But what happens when the event is over? 

How do you find people or reach out to the community afterwards? 

For this event we put together a Boise MeetUp.com site so everyone can stay connected.  You’ll also find other things there like photos, presentation uploads and feedback on the event itself. 

So whether you were able to make it or not, feel free to visit MeetUp.com and get connected with your local community of geo-developers.  Also stay tuned for future up and coming events.

Until next time…

EDN Team

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the Dev Meetup in Pasadena last night. We had a great turnout about 30 people from a variety of companies and development backgrounds.

Here’s a quick recap for those who missed it.

We started off with a great overview of Windows Phone 7 (WP7) from Scott Kerfoot, senior director at Microsoft. He brought four WP7 devices (one of course his personal) with him that were circulated around the audience to test drive. Scott covered everything from how the Marketplace will work for application development and deployment to where you can find the development environments to build custom applications. And if you didn’t know, the WP7 dev environments Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2010 Express are totally free, so it is easy to get started.

For the lightning talks we had everything from the City of LA discussing their GIS Web services, to an implementation of the ArcGIS API for Flex that combined PHP and .NET and an interesting concept on how to allow non-GIS professionals to sketch geographically referenced vector data using just PDF, paper, and pencil. There was also a great introductory talk on the benefits of using jQuery. I think that was great timing for Al, as he is doing some JavaScript development right now. A special thanks to everyone who presented!  

Also, if you didn’t hear we are raffling off an EDN subscription and an Esri Developer Summit pass at the Dev Meet Ups. Brian Simms won the EDN subscription and Michael Luna won the Developer Summit pass. Congrats guys!

After the presentations, the social started with food, drinks, and dev talk. We (AL, Andy, and David) found ourselves talking about everything from ArcObjects Geodatabase extensions, Python, Flex, Silverlight, WP7, to selecting a framework for creating a REST based service.  

Overall, our second Meet Up was a great success! Great presentations, interesting conversations, new connections, and delicious food and drinks.  Exactly what we are going for with these Meet Ups.

Thanks to everyone for coming out and making this such a success. 

See you next time!

David

Oh yeah, don’t forget to join our Linkedin group to stay connected on what’s going on.