First in a series on 9.2

With over a month of 9.2 under my belt I can start to give some feedback. In re-reading this post I realize it is not very well organized but I just wanted to get some of my ideas out there before I forget some of my initial impressions.
First of all, before you uninstall 9.1 make sure you uninstall ALL plugins first and then uninstall 9.1. Some people in my company have had crashing problems with 9.2 and we think it may be due to junk left over. I uninstalled 9.1, rebooted, deleted the arcgis folders, went through the registry and did manual deletions (not for the faint of heart or if you don’t have a 1/2 hour to spare), rebooted, and then installed. Not for the ESRI install team – please write an uninstaller that actually cleans ALL the junk ArcGIS puts in the registry. Use a regcleaner doesn’t do much good since it usually requires you to use the machine for several days without the application before you run the cleaner. Most of us use ArcGIS day in and day out so we can’t afford to be without it for several days.

9.2 is rock solid for me with much fewer crashes. More of the geoprocessing tools seem to work. The ability to export grids to a bazillion different formats has saved us on one project already. AutoCad was having reading some GeoTiffs from a client so I just exported them as GeoPNGs and we were good to go. I like the keyboard shortcuts though I haven’t really learned that many yet – ctrl-t is my favorite since it opens the table view for a layer.

One note about datum transformations.. I know this document explaining the applicatiablity of the different datum transforms exists on the support site but why is it not included in the help? Seems to me it should even be linked to the project tool dialog since that is when I need the information most.

I think one of the greatest new features is the Personal SDE. Kudos to Craig and the other people on the geodb team for bringing this to fruition. I had never used this before I left so my 9.2 install was my first experience. Let me just say it was smooth smooth smooth. Easy cheesy to connect and get data into it right away. And there is it I have a version of SDE with all of SDE’s features running on my laptop ready for me to explore. The fact that replication can occur between this geodatabase and any other SDE geodatabase is huge. I can already see several scenarios for using this on our tablets. I also love the ability to detach a geodatabase and transfer it to another user.

Unlike the file geodb I can actually open this database with the SQL Server tools or ODBC into it with Access or use the SQL Server JDBC driver. Once they release SDE on postgresql why would I even need a cross platform solutions in a file geodb (I say that with tongue in cheek). I hope the postgresql version of SDE can be run like this as well. That would be the hawesome.

One suggestion for the geodb team is that they should perhaps give some documentation for users who already have SQL Express through a Vis Studio install. MS is really pushing SQL Express pretty hard and so it is likely that .NET developers will already have SQL Express installed or will want to install it after loading personal SDE. I already patched my SQL Express to service pack 2, which basically means re-install SQL Express. I couldn’t remember if I had installed personal SDE on my laptop so I am not sure if you need to re-install personal SDE after upgrading to SP2.

The bind for me is that I installed the default instance for Vis. Studio as MSSQLSERVER and personal SDE as SQLSERVER. Therefore I wasn’t sure how to approach the upgrade since I could see both instances. I suppose I should re-run the install to upgrade the other instance. I am not sure if that is right so if anyone has the correct answer please let me know. Still not as stable as some of the older products but I am happier with this version of ArcGIS. Overall I give 9.2 a thumbs up over 9.1. More comments to follow in the future…

Notes from the ESRI CA/HI/NV/Guam Regional users group

So today I gave a 45 minute talk at the RUG group meeting.  I will try to upload my PPT about building tools for habitat conservation plan monitoring later. I had fun giving the talk and it was a good crowd.

Here are the interesting notes from Clint Brown and ESRI staff’s opening talk:

1. There is an API forthcoming for the file geodatabase. Until that comes out I will only use the file-gdb for ArcObject only projects and maybe not even then. I like being able to see the data without being locked into using an ESRI product all the time. They did not commit to a timeline but said they wanted to take their time and get it right. To me that seems like a 10.x release.

2.  9.3 should be released as a beta at the UC in June and it is basically only minor features with more bug fixes and stability improvements. Yeehaaa is what I have to say to that.3.

3. Postgresql for SDE will come out with 9.3 – bring it on! Less money on SQLServer more money on ESRI products.

4. There was some discussion of bringing ArcPad to a native .NET application rather than it’s current form. To me this is a great idea since ArcPad is windows only right now and by making it .NET will allow developers a much nicer customization experince.

5. Next year will be the release of ArcGIS 10.x. He claimed 64-bit, multi-threaded, more Java support, more linux support, native graphics support. The only way I see this  happening is for a major re-write of ArcObjects off of COM. This was the most exciting news to me. This will be good for both .NET and Java developers.

I realized why the CAD plugin blog post was pulled – because ESRI is releasing it as a part of a 9.3 product launch.

ArcIMS is still around but I don’t really think there is much path forward (my interpreation not explicitly spoken). They talked about migrating to ArcGIS Server when “you are ready”. All their talks are about ArcGIS server and none on ArcIMS.

I take all of these dates with a grain-o-salt but it was still pretty interesting news. I will be interested to hear what comes out of the UC in June.

I am also starting to see a coherent ArcGIS product marketing picture. Desktop is for the serious GIS professional and then there is Server GIS for storing large datasets and then sharing it and pushing some of the GIS analysis out to end users. So Server is an integral part of the ESRI picture moving forward – if you didn’t believe it before, believe it now. They are going to keep on building Server to be an integral part of the ESRI stack. I wonder how they are going to manage this with the price points. There were several smaller municipalities or small consulting firms talking about inability to afford ArcEditor licenses let alone Server.

There is also ArcGISOnline in the picture and I am not  sure how that is going to play out. I think they are trying to provide some basic GIS layers publically available for GIS professionals to build on top of.

Other feedback I got from other GIS pros in attendance:

GP still needs stability and error reporting work. There are quite a few hard core users who still do not use GP because of frequent failures and crashes.

Should be  fun to be at the Dev Summit to talk about these things with other developers and see the updates to the ESRI message.