ESRI UC 2009 Day 2 update

Day two at the User Conference seems to be quiet or there aren’t many updates yet. A friend of mine, Jithen Singh,  already did a hard work of compiling a list of news for upcoming version of ArcGIS 9.4.
Here are some highlights for Desktop:

• Extension of layer packages to include tools, models, globes and diagrams
• Improved Table Of Content – allows rendering of cartographic representations
• Add models into toolbar
• Multiple page PDF export
• Support for Windows 7
• Run geoprocessing in the background

For full list of changes for Desktop, Server and Mobile go to Mandown.

ESRI UC 2009 Day 1 update

Here are most interesting bits from day 1 of the ESRI User Conference. Unfortunately these are not first hand news but compiled from number of blogs and news from the internet.

Plenary session
In first part Jack has described the vision of this conference – Maps and GIS are changing and there are new ways to take advantage of GIS.

ArcGIS Explorer 900 was showed and new features were demonstrated (more on that later).
Second part was about the next release – 9.4. Highlights of upcoming 9.4 version are:

• Run in parallel with 9.3 on same machine
• New dockable windows (attribute table, ArcCatalog, etc)
• Search integrated in ArcMap
• Search for symbol by name
• Predefined edit tasks
• Integration of Python in ArcMap
• New Base maps for continuous redraw and panning
• Improved 3D performance and SketchUp support
• Open geodatabase API

ArcGIS Explorer 900
Information about AGX 900 is know for a while but now the key features were shown and more details can be found on AGX blog. These include:

• Toggle between 3D and 2D
• Use of layer packages from ArcGIS 9.3.1
• Presentation mode
• Ribbon interface
• Bing data support
• Support for all ArcGIS projections and transformations
• Customization without programming

Other news

• ArcGIS API for Silverlight/WPF released
• ArcGIS API for Silverlight/WPF toolkit released on Codeplex
• MapIt product released

This is just a very quick pick of most interesting topics. More details coming soon.

ESRI 2009 User Conference starts tomorrow

Tomorrow is the start of User Conference for 2009. As expected there is an official page providing lot of information like featured sessions, on-line agenda, accommodation and other.



Collection of quick links include Facebook, Twitter and Flickr pages. As alternative you can simply subscribe to RSS feeds from this page.

If you haven’t been at the Conference you know it is really busy and spread across very large area. To help you find your way use UC Route Finder. This will show distance and time required to get to the destination and it is also viewable in 3D.



Very soon we are expecting a flood of news from the Conference. I am hoping that ArcGIS Explorer 900 will be released within next few days. AGX blog has plenty of information and photos from specialist events where it will be demonstrated (homeland security, education, etc).

It will be quite hard to keep up with all news but hopefully in next week or two I’ll be able to pick out most interesting news and videos.

Tips for faster caching of ArcGIS Server

ESRI Mapping Center has a post about improving performance of caching in ArcGIS Server (AGS). If you did any work in this area you know this is very demanding and time consuming process. We (Eagle Technology) created cache for several customers and this can easily take full 3 days to create the cache.

From list of recommendations there is one I didn’t really consider but it makes perfect sense - Relocate the server’s pagefile.sys file.

I like the note about checking of available memory:

This is especially important if you’ve got other services running on the server, because these services are taking up memory, too, and you want to make sure the caching process, which will be more demanding of memory usage, is not pushing out of your available physical RAM and into your pagefile.sys (which will result in catastrophically slower caching times!)

Starcraft 2 update

There are some interesting news and updates of Starcraft II. Some of these mentioned here are not the latest but are still interesting enough.

Here at Press 2 Play TV is an interview with Dustin Browder, lead designer for Starcraft 2 and Chris Sigtay, lead producer. Topics covered include engine development (from ground up) including graphics engine, reasons for splitting up the game in 3 titles. There are some hints about single player missions:

• holding off hordes of infested colonists
• walls of fire burning across the map
• surviving supernova

Soundtrack and music is also discussed, beta testing, release date…
At the moments audio quality is not too good but you get a lot of info for 17:25 of an interview.

Battle.net Q&A Batch 52
Theme for this batch was Map Maker. Some of the key points:

• support for custom function definitions, including actions and conditions in Trigger Editor
• entirely new scripting language called Galaxy. This language is very similar to C.
• map makers will have the ability to define any number of custom attributes that modify a hero based on its level

Dev talk
Inc Gamers interview with Rob Pardo, Dustin Browder and Chris Sigtay reveals some interesting features :

• Development of new Battle.net
• possibility to create mods - "It's EXTREMELY complicated, but it's possible".
• No support for LAN
• noob friendly game for casual gamers (view of tech tree, detailed replay, challenges)

Technology tree
Yesterday a couple of sites has shown technology tree for SC2. One of sites is Kotaku.
I guess comments are not really required, so here they are.

Zerg

Protoss


Terran

Q & A about 2009 ESRI International User Conference

2009 ESRI User Conference is near (13-17 July) and ESRI has published the results from survey. Make sure you have plenty of free time if you want to read the full Q & A document – there are 178 questions and answers!



Full list is available here. I will post my pick of most interesting questions from this list later this week.

ArcGIS 9.3.1 REST Services Patch

Another patch for ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 was released. This patch addresses cases where, under heavy load, adding additional SOC machines does not improve performance when using REST services.

Issue fixed with this patch is:

• NIM045052 - Adding additional SOC machines does not improve ArcGIS Server system performance when using REST services.

Even if this does not apply to Desktop or Engine but one of assemblies for Desktop and Engine is affected.

File is GIS931-Server-RestSvcs-Patch.msp and it is 2.1 MB. Full details are available here.