mandown, geo.geek.nz

ArcGIS 9.3.1 Download Layer Package Patch

Jithen (J) Singh — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:17:58 GMT

ESRI released this patch a few weeks back but since then there has been a few issues so the patch has been pulled and updated. The final version of this patch is now up. The ArcGIS 9.3.1 Download Layer Package Patch was released to address issues with downloading secure content from ArcGIS Online when using ArcGIS.

This patch addresses issues with downloading secure content from ArcGIS Online when using ArcGIS Desktop. Content that is not shared with everyone cannot be downloaded. This patch allows all content from ArcGIS Online to be downloaded. We recommend that all Desktop users download and install this Patch at their earliest convenience to ensure the highest quality experience when working with ArcGIS 9.3.1.

ArcGIS Online is now in public beta. Information about this can be found here: http://mandown.co.nz/esri/.... It is highly recommended for those going to make use of ArcGIS Online to apply this patch.

Information on this patch, including download links can be found here: http://support.esri.com/index.cfm...

Enterprise Resource Centre Added To The ESRI Resource Centres

Jithen (J) Singh — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:56:57 GMT

A big new addition to the ESRI Resource Centres is the Enterprise Resource Centre. Launched a few days ago, the Enterprise Resource Centre contains resources to help IT professionals implement a sustainable enterprise GIS. The Enterprise Resource Centre contains best practices, patterns and guidance in the areas of security, performance and scalability, application architecture and interoperability.

The Enterprise Resource Centre is broken into three categories for resources.

Application Architectures

The ArcGIS Platform provides a comprehensive suite of applications and services. The Application Architecture section of the Enterprise GIS Resource Center provides an introduction to the ArcGIS Platform, along with standardized representations for each of the core Application Architectures. For more information on the different application types (Rich Client, etc.), including pros, cons and other considerations, please visit Microsoft's® open source Application Architecture Guide.

Within this, there are four key areas covered. These include Rich Client Applications, Web Applications, Services, Mobile.

Security

The Security Resource Center provides unified access to Security related information for enterprise solutions utilizing ESRI products. It is intended primarily to help IT Architects, Managers and Administrators understand ESRI's approach to security, and how the ArcGIS Platform can be implemented securely.

Three key areas are covered here. Strategy, Mechanisms, Application Security

Performance And Scalability

Performance is a measure of the speed at which a computer system works. Scalability is the ability to grow in size or complexity without showing negative effects. Problems in either area may expose the enterprise to operating inefficiencies and potentially general failure of critical business components. Testing, monitoring, and tuning the environment will ensure optimal performance and user satisfaction.

Three key areas here as well. Application Performance Considerations, Infrastructure Performance Considerations, Capacity, Performance Benchmarks and Testing.

To add to these excellent resources is the community. The community includes a number of galleries. The implementation gallery contains a number of resources from benchmarks through to security guidance through to test reports, while the media gallery includes a number presentation slide decks from the ESRI Developer Summit 2009.

This is a now a one stop portal for finding resources on implementing an enterprise GIS. It is a very valuable resource and encourage users to make use of the important resources on this new Enterprise Resource Centre.

You can find the Enterprise Resource Centre here: http://resources.esri.com/enterprisegis/

Tips For Speeding Up Caching ArcGIS Server Map Services

Jithen (J) Singh — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:31:16 GMT

Users are always on the lookout for ways to speed up map caching. There are a few things that users can take into consideration when looking into speeding up caching ArcGIS Server map services. The Mapping Centre has complied a short list of some of what they have learnt over the past few months. This list if focused around how you can optimise the environment you are caching your map in.

So what are these tips?

Upgrade to ArcGIS 9.3.1. If you have not upgraded to 9.3.1, do it before caching because the file I/O for writing map cache tile images was vastly improved in the latest version. The result is anywhere from 25% to 2000% faster caching. Basically, the simpler the map, the more improvement you’ll see. That’s because simple maps draw faster and therefore file I/O is a larger proportion of caching time.

Use more than one computer to cache. If you have the luxury of using several computers to do your caching, break up the caching job first by map level, and, if needed for the largest scales, geographically. Each portion of the job should be done such that tiles are being written to each of the several computers’ hard drives. When the caching is done, then copy the tiles from each machine into a master cache. One tip here is that we bought a software application called Secure Copy by ScriptLogic Corporation which made the job of copying possible for the largest scales where the potential exists to produce millions of map tiles.

Set the number of processes to two. We’ve found that two is the optimum number of processes on each computer doing caching (we’ve been using 2 Duo CPUs E8500s each with 4Gb of RAM). One process just doesn’t take full advantage of available CPU and memory. Three processes pin the CPU, but actually produces fewer tiles per hour than two processes. Our theory is that file I/O is maxed out—we’ve been using 250GB and 1TB internal IDE hard drives.

Turn off the option for indexing in your cache folder. In the Windows file manager, right-click on your cache folder and select Properties, then click Advanced (Windows XP), and uncheck the option “For fast searching, allow Indexing Service to index this folder”. This will make cache production 15-20% faster.

Check your available memory. During our caching processes, we’ve usually got the Windows Task Manager open because we want to know how much memory is being used by the ArcSOC.exe processes that are being used to create the cache. This is especially important if you’ve got other services running on the server, because these services are taking up memory, too, and you want to make sure the caching process, which will be more demanding of memory usage, is not pushing out of your available physical RAM and into your pagefile.sys (which will result in catastrophically slower caching times!)

Relocate the server’s pagefile.sys file. Unfortunately, stability of the caching process can be an issue, especially if you have other services running on your server. We’ve found one particularly good practice to minimize unexpected stoppage of our caching processes, which is to relocate the server’s pagefile.sys file onto a dedicated partition, preferably on a disk that is not primarily involved in caching. Minimally, we used to do this for printing large maps because it kept the pagefile.sys file from becoming fragmented, which limited the size of available memory blocks.

Avoid having other services running while you are caching – this is really a summarization of the last few tips together!

The Mapping Centre’s post on these tips can be found here: http://blogs.esri.com/support/...

Integrating The Adobe Flex Builder Plugin Into An Existing Eclipse IDE

Jithen (J) Singh — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:57:45 GMT

For those that have been wondering how to go about doing this. A short article has been posted by the ESRI Support Centre. This article provides a brief look into integrating the Adobe Flex Builder Plugin into an existing Eclipse IDE.

You can find this article here: http://blogs.esri.com/support/...

Extremely useful for existing Java ADF developers wanting to work with the ArcGIS API for Flex.

ArcGIS Online Public Beta Now Available!

Jithen (J) Singh — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:55:05 GMT

Earlier this morning the new ArcGIS Online went into public beta. ArcGIS Online has been in a limited beta stage for quite a few months as the development teams have been adding new features and fixing issues.

The new ArcGIS Online opens a number of doors for GIS users allowing sharing and finding of GIS content across the web.

With ArcGIS Online, you can upload maps, register online map services, create and save Web maps as items for others to share, and discover and use maps published by ESRI and other ESRI users. You can organize and control access to the maps you share by making them public or private, and you can create and join groups.

The ArcGIS Online Team has great write up on how it works, along with a nice sharing demonstration. This write up can be found here: http://blogs.esri.com/support/...

If you are wanting to make use of ArcGIS Explorer with some of the shared layers on ArcGIS Online, remember this is intended only for use with ArcGIS Explorer 900. ArcGIS Explorer 900 is still in limited beta stage.

Go have a look at the new ArcGIS Online and start sharing some of your data! You can access this here: http://www.arcgisonline.com

ArcGIS 9.3.1 Seminar Series, “Creating Effective Web Maps” To Be Held In Auckland And Wellington. Register Now! Limited Spaces!

Jithen (J) Singh — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:14:59 GMT

Information on the upcoming ArcGIS 9.3.1 Seminar Series, “Creating Effective Web Maps” is now live.

Location: Eagle Technology Group Ltd, Auckland, New Zealand.
Date: Tuesday June 30, 2009

Location: Eagle Technology Group Ltd, Wellington, New Zealand
Date: Thursday July 2, 2009

There is going to be a morning session and an afternoon session at each venue making it four sessions in total. Spaces are limited. The agenda is as follows:

Morning session:
9:00-10:15: Design Strategies for Authoring and Publishing
10:15-10:30: Break
10:30-12:00: Building Web Applications

Afternoon session:
1:00-2:15: Design Strategies for Authoring and Publishing
2:15-2:30: Break
2:30-4:00: Building Web Applications

Who should attend this ArcGIS 9.3.1 Seminar Series?

ArcIMS users who want to make faster, more effective Web maps

ArcGIS Desktop users interested in learning how to share their maps via the Web

ArcGIS Server users who want to learn about best practices using new ArcGIS 9.3.1 tools

A full description on this ArcGIS 9.3.1 Seminar Series, “Creating Effective Web Maps”, along with registration information can be found here: http://www.eagle.co.nz/gis931/. As mentioned above, spaces are limited so get in quickly!

Release Candidate ArcGIS API For Microsoft Silverlight/WPF Now Available

Jithen (J) Singh — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:55:00 GMT

The release candidate build of the ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight/WPF is now available download from the ESRI Resource Centre for ArcGIS Server.

Build numbers are as follows:

Initial Release: 1.0.0.160

Updated Release: 1.0.0.209

Release Candidate: 1.0.0.255

There are a number of updates and enhancements along with a few breaking changes as well as a few bugs which have been resolved. The updates/enhancements include:

Breaking Change: All assemblies and namespaces have been appended with name “Client”. For example: ESRI.ArcGIS.* has become ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.*. This change was made to clearly demark the Silverlight\WPF assemblies and types and avoid collisions with other ESRI APIs, such as ArcObjects.

Breaking Change: The ESRI.ArcGIS.Widgets.* assembly and namespace is now ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.Toolkit.*.

Breaking Change: The ESRI.ArcGIS.VirtualEarth.* assembly and namespace is now ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.Bing.*.

Marker, line and fill outline symbols do not scale while zooming.

Breaking Change: The ICopyrightPanel interface has been removed. Map layer copyright information has been removed from the Map control.

Breaking Change: ClassBreakRenderer has been renamed to ClassBreaksRenderer.

Breaking Change: Clustering has been moved from FeatureLayer to GraphicsLayer. Clustering is also customizable. You can define the properties of the flare and cluster symbols. See the Simple Clusterer and Custom Clusterer samples for an example.

GraphicsLayer has an IsHitTestVisible property to enable\disable interaction with mouse events.

ArcGIS Server Map service layers have a Unit property to discover the unit of the map (e.g. esriDecimalDegrees, esriMeters).

Tasks have an IsBusy property and a CancelAsync() method. When a task instance is executing (sending a request and waiting for a response) the IsBusy property returns true. To cancel execution, call CancelAsync().

Task operations allow for including a user token (user defined object) when executing the task. The user token will be returned to the appropriate event handler when task execution completes or fails.

RoutingTask has been added to support routing operations provided by ArcGIS Server Network Analyst services.

The list of resolved bugs can be found here: http://resources.esri.com/help/...

Most of the breaking changes seem to be around the change to namespaces. This shouldn’t pose too much of a problem when updating to this release candidate.

Samples and reference documentation has also been updated. You can download this new build here: http://resources.esri.com/arcgisserver/...

View The Interactive Map On The New Zealand Archaeological Association's Archaeological Site Recording Scheme Website

Jithen (J) Singh — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:51:19 GMT

Late last week the New Zealand Archaeological Association launched their new site recording scheme website.

ArchSite is a new initiative that will enable people to more easily access information about archaeological sites in New Zealand. ArchSite is an online database that contains information about recorded archaeological sites, and uses GIS (Geographic Information System) technology to manage and display site information. ArchSite is the national inventory of archaeological sites in New Zealand, and the information it contains is used for research, site management and protection. There are currently over 60,000 sites recorded in ArchSite.

The public version of the interactive map is now available. The interactive map was built by our Professional Services Team.

The site features the ArcGIS API for JavaScript powered by ArcGIS Server 9.3 SP1. The base maps are cached providing a great user experience. Points are dynamic drawn once below a certain scale level. Users also have the ability to query points which provide the NZAA ID which they can then use when contacting NZAA. Great work guys :)

ArcGIS Server And Virtualisation

Jithen (J) Singh — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:40:00 GMT

A new whitepaper has been published which talks about the common topic of ArcGIS Server and virtualisation.

Virtualization is becoming a standard IT practice. It is becoming increasingly popular among ArcGIS® customers as well. Virtualization solutions are being broadly used in test, development, and production environments, providing tremendous benefits to ArcGIS Server deployments. ESRI uses virtualization technologies for the development, quality assurance, and certification processes of ArcGIS Server. This document provides an overview of virtualization and addresses some of the most common questions regarding ArcGIS Server and virtualization.

This document provides an overview of virtualization and addresses some of the most common questions regarding ArcGIS Server and virtualization, including major decision factors for considering virtualization and the advantages of deploying ArcGIS Server in a virtualized environment.

You can have a read of this whitepaper here: http://www.esri.com/library/...

Learn To Use Map Templates, A New Resource From ESRI

Jithen (J) Singh — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:16:49 GMT

With the recent addition of the ArcGIS Map Templates Resource Centre, ESRI now offers map templates as a new resource to help ArcGIS software users make great-looking, professional-quality maps for print, the Web and mobile applications. To complement this, ESRI will be hosting a live training seminar which will allow users to tune into a free live training seminar about using templates to improve mapmaking skills.

Getting Started with Map Templates, a live training seminar airing at www.esri.com/lts on Thursday, June 25, 2009, will walk geographic information system (GIS) professionals and cartographers through the process of working with the templates. The times will be 9:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 3:00 p.m. (Pacific daylight time).

The seminar's presenter will explain how to get started using the templates and how to adapt the cartographic and data designs to other maps.

Attendees will also learn about

How to download map templates from the ESRI Resource Center at http://resources.esri.com/maptemplates

What the map template kits contain

How to use data with a map template

Different kinds of map templates (e.g., street, topographic, and local government maps)

Publishing map templates as mapping services via ArcGIS Online

Mapmakers from any organization who want to create professional-grade maps will find this live training seminar interesting and useful. GIS professionals and cartographers who are familiar with ArcGIS Desktop software and make maps on a regular basis will benefit.

This press release can be found here: http://www.esri.com/news/...