ESRI Developer Summit 2009

DevSummit started today at Palm Springs. This is conference for GIS developers but even if you are not one you can get a lot of interesting news, insights and product announcements.
My colleague Jithen is attending DevSummit and to get more details read his post on Mandown. Here are some details of upcoming release of ArcGIS 9.3.1 and ArcGIS 9.4.

ArcGIS Server has been improved to allow for faster mapping. Some of the other big changes include:

1. NEW ADF licensing. You are now allowed to deploy the ADF how you want without any restrictions.
2. NEW editing capabilities will be available in ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 Standard Edition.
3. NEW analytics extensions will be available in ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 Advanced Edition.

Faster mapping will provide for faster dynamic maps along with higher quality outputs and optimization tools built into ArcMap to help analyse errors and problems before they are published to ArcGIS Server.

There are some details about desktop part of ArcGIS in 9.4 but don’t expect that yet. ArcGIS 9.3.1 should be released around May this year. For New Zealand customers we should expect it around July.

ArcMap will sport a similar feel to Microsoft Visual Studio. Dockable windows and improved toolbars. New built in searching capabilities. One search for finding data on your system to finding geoprocessing models. ArcCatalog will be built into ArcMap and made available via a dockable window. Drag and drop will be supported as well. A whole new reporting engine has been written and will be included within ArcMap. Python will be integrated within ArcMap. A new Python window will be available directly from ArcMap which will allow you to run and debug Python scripts directly. Python scripts will also run asynchronously so you can continue working while your script is running in the background.

Another highlight of the conference so far is ArcGIS Explorer 900 (AGX).  Bernie Szukalski gave presentation of new features for new release. Details are posted on ArcGIS Explorer blog including plenty of screenshots.
 
One of the new features is revamped UI – ribbon style. I don’t know if you like ribbon in Office 2007 but here is what we’ll get in AGX 900.

More news to follow from DevSummit…