Simplify SOE Deployment with Self Registration

Registering SOE’s can be a pain, but there is an easier way.

Esri suggests having a separate exe that registers the dll, but this needs to be done after running Regasm on it.

On top of that, if you’re running Win7, and right click on a .bat file and choose to “run as Administrator”, the current working directory does not get set to the folder where the .bat is located. What a pain.

Instead of building an SOE as a dll, build it as an exe. The Main program of the SOE can do the registration/unregistration. First, by calling Regasm, and then by registering with AGS, similar to Esri’s sample.

I haven’t tested this a lot in production, so if you run into issues, please let me know.

I’ve posted a sample solution here that illustrates this.

Network Trace Add-in for ArcGIS Silverlight Viewer

network trace add-in

Today, without any coding, I created this web mapping app that performs network tracing. (Edit: to activate the trace toolbar, click the far right button on the main toolbar).

OK, I lie. I did spend a bit of time coding over the past couple of weeks, but the resulting tools: an Add-in for the ArcGIS Silverlight Viewer, and a Network Trace Server Object Extension can be re-used easily in three steps – without writing any code.

1) create an mxd that references one or more geometric networks, set the projection on the dataframe to web mercator. The network I used was downloaded as a file geodatabase from the National Hydrography Dataset.

2) publish the mxd as a map service, configuring it to use the Network Trace SOE.

3) using the Builder, create a viewer app that includes the mapservice and the Network Trace tool, configured to point to the mapservice.

If you’ve used Arcmap’s Utility Network Analyst toolbar, you may find this add-in tool familiar.

For more information on the Builder, see Esri’s Silverlight/WPF blog post.

Update

I’ve entered this in the USGS Mashathon here. Please sign in (free) and vote by clicking on the “manage chips” link.

Indoor GIS with Wp7

Professor Mike Goodchild says

the average American only spends 13 percent of the time outdoors. GIS-based services help us find restaurants and hotels, but they offer almost no support for navigating in the complex indoor spaces of shopping centers, hospitals, mines, or airports.

I still get disoriented at the Dev summit. I’d like to be able to see a floor plan map of the conference center, oriented to north centered on my location. It seems like the WiFi routers could be used for in door geolocation. However I don’t see anything in Wp7 that would estimate my location based on relative strengths of nearby wifi routers.