And what is Desktop, Chopped Liver ?

James has pointed out how ESRI is focusing more on Server than Desktop at the upcoming Dev Summit. This is not just in terms of Conference resources. There are cool & useful things in ArcGIS server that have no equivalent in Desktop.

For example, take a look a the FeatureGraphicsLayer, available in AGS. This handy class inherits from DataTable.

So what about desktop? I can create an in-memory featureclass via an InMemoryWorkspaceFactory (by trial and error, there’s not much documentation). However, it’s still an IFeatureClass … it would really be better if I had a something like a layer that inherits from ADO DataTable that could be shown with a TableView in ArcMap.

The Moons of Neptune

My 3rd grade daughter asked me to help prepare a report on Neptune.

I looked at wikipedia’s entry on Neptune, where it says Neptune has 13 moons.

I searched NASA for Neptune and it returned a list of links. I clicked on the first link listed and was directed me to a page saying Neptune has 11 moons. How was I going to explain this to my daughter? After a closer look I realized other pages at NASA agree with wikipedia.

This points out a deficiency in NASA: they can put a man on the moon but they can’t maintain a consistent database. Then I realized they are simply hosting World Book Encyclopedia‘s obsolete data. Hopefully new collaboration with Google will improve this situation. NASA uses a wiki for WorldWind , seems like they could wikify other areas too.

Speaking of NASA WorldWind, the Sloan Digital Sky survey is pretty cool, but I don’t see a way to search for planets/stars by name within WorldWind.

Migrating WordPress to WordPress, Adding ArcGIS References

I’ve moved to a new blog hosting site. Yahoo Small Business webhosting does not allow me to edit my .htaccess. My feed to planetgs is broken, James suggested editing my .htaccess file, but Yahoo does not allow this. I’m not the only one to have this problem.

Anyway, back to GIS.

Adding References

I really like being able to right click on References in VS and choose “Add ArcGIS Reference…” – this is much faster than “Add Reference…”.

I now wish ESRI would include a checkbox on the “Add ArcGIS Reference” dialog saying “add using statement”. If this is checked then it would add a “using” statement at the top of my current document.

Alternatively, in the code editor window, I would like to be able to simply highlight one or more “using” statements, right click and choose “Add References for these” (or something like that). This would allow me to quickly add references to the references folder for each using statement in my source code.

Realtor GeoRSS

While I’m wishing for things, why hasn’t someone like www.realtor.com developed a web app to let me draw polygons around specific areas on the map and get notified when new listings come in that fall within my polygons? Shouldn’t this be simple with GeoRSS?

Concrete LBS

Another location based service: Let’s say I want a slab poured in my back yard. I’ve got the forms all laid out but am in no great hurry to get it poured. I’m willing to wait if the price is right. Let’s also say there’s a cement concrete truck stuck in traffic near my house. I’ve heard its a big problem when concrete is not poured once it starts thickening. The driver could get a listing of nearby slab requests and come pour my slab, at a discount of course.