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.