Monday 14 December 2009

An interesting AU session on the internals of MapGuide

Though I didn't go to Autodesk University in person or virtually (maybe I will one day), I'm always interested in checking out the Geospatial-focused sessions that have been posted online. This year, there seemed to be the usual lot of sessions introducing MapGuide/FDO/Map3D, but one particular session caught my eye of interest:

http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=class&session_id=5241

This session is particularly special because at face value, it is not introductory in any way. You are assumed to know about what MapGuide and FDO are about. The session goes through the internals of MapGuide and demonstrates an example of using MapGuide in a standalone context (no server tier, no web tier).

This is a one of a kind presentation. I recommend checking out the slides/sample/podcast. It has certainly opened my eyes to the possibilities!

Wednesday 9 December 2009

FDO Toolbox v0.9.1

Here's a new release, with lots of useful fixes.

New Stuff
  • Added an express connection option for ArcSDE
  • The BulkCopy command in FdoUtil.exe now has a geometry flattening parameter (-flatten)
  • A "fix schema incompatibilities" option is now available when creating an SDF/SHP/SQLite files with a loaded feature schema definition.
  • You can now delete/update multiple selected rows in a Data Query result set. Same restrictions apply (eg. No identity properties in result set = Can't update/delete)
  • You can now have connection names with slashes in them, these are interpreted as folder names when saving to / loading from the session directory.
Fixed Stuff
  • When doing a partial schema save, additional checks are performed to prevent an invalid schema from being saved (eg. A unique constraint for a property that is removed)
  • Fixed the BulkCopy command in FdoUtil.exe to work with the new Bulk Copy API
  • Fixed the RunTask command in FdoUtil.exe where it was really possible for the wrong data source to be trashed if your copy tasks had DeleteTarget = true
  • Queries performed in the Data Query UI are now done using qualified class names. This should now work on data stores with multiple schemas each containing 1 or more identically named feature classes.
  • Fixed SQL Server saved connections not reloading on next startup
Other Stuff of note
  • Since we are now targeting .net Framework 2.0 SP1, I can now take advantage of some of the new C#3.0 features while still being able to target framework 2.0. As a result the project files have been migrated to Visual Studio 2008 format. You'll need msbuild from .net Framework 3.5 to build the source code if you do not have Visual Studio 2008 installed.
  • Data Query is currently broken in ArcSDE. I'm looking for a solution