Plenary session

Sleeping in hotels is a problem for me so I fell asleep late and then woke up late. I missed Scott’s plenary part but it seemed close to what I have heard before.

For the second part of the plenary….

They put together the 3 circles for desktop – server – ArcGIS Online

They said they want less documentation on objects and interfaces and more on how to use.
That only gets you so far and I think they are missing the point for what dedvelopers need. We need both. Conceptual help to get started but then when are deep into it we need the API doc to let us know about all the parameters and what they mean. They are also pushing the web services – if I am supposed to use the web service interfaces then they need better documentation.

Rex does a nice demo of taking a map to web application flow.  Nice flow of work and pretty sweet pieces in the objects ESRI gives you.

Jay does a really shweet demo showing BPEL – explained it well and it worked.

Frederic Mobile ADF looked awesome – would be great for my field biologists. Great that it is pure .NET with a simple deploy and .NET data patterns. Too bad I need ArcGIS Server enterprise to purchase it.

Shelley on ArcGIS Explorer – she shows a nice custom task to import Excel – geocode – and then put the points on the map. That is a great scenario. I could see exporting CNDDB points from the extent to an excel spreadsheet. The talk was great but it is also fun to hear hear her scottish accent. The ui for a task is just normal .NET UI controls – very nice. So once you make the investment for server I can see this as a valuable too. James brought up the interesting point that most of this could be done in a web ui – and I think this is a general discussion right now about what is the value of the thick client versus just the browser.

Now McKinney is introducing on ArcGIS online I didn’t catch the name of the presenter – focused on the ArcGIS desktop
“A rich set of resource to extand and enhance the ArcGIS user experience online.” arcgisonline.esri.com

Mansour is giving his demo for ArcWeb Services it is fricking sweet. He uses IDEA – I always knew he was brilliant but this is just further proof. I can not really describe how delicious his demos were – you are just going to have to wait for the movies. Suffices to say, now that I have an EDN subscription I am going to have to look into this.

So here  is my concern with online services – the network is not ubiquitous yet. If I am not on the network I need a local cache – Mobile ADF handles this and I guess there is checkin and checkout with ArcGIS Server basic and Personal SDE.  More discussion needs to happen about the implications of all this server-networking-ification of GIS and how to handle data synchronization and disconnected use.

Now on to Clint to tie it up
Talks about several different clients – server, mobile, online…
The geodatabase is a huge piece moving forward but we already knew that. Different layers of authoring.

Overall a good plenary with some interesting ideas for the homefront….

Time for Lunch