I’m usually an early adopter of all things software but I have to admit that I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t had much time to update to ArcGIS 10 Desktop yet. I moaned to my ESRI rep a few weeks back and have media sitting on my desk waiting to install… (Still haven’t gotten our ArcGIS Server V 10 media yet). The truth is that I’ve been busy working on the server side of things namely playing around with the Flex 2 Viewer (beta) while waiting for my new computer to arrive no sense in installing 10 twice . The good news is that the beast arrived today the bad news is now I have to backup and get prepared for migrating to a new machine while trying to finish that Flex app… I’m having fun but its getting a bit tiring thinking about my growing to-do-list that  is getting bigger everyday as well as the other  looming projects. What’s a multi-tasking running out of time GIS nut to do?

  About a year ago I was having a little chat with a developer of a application that we were interested in purchasing for work and he informed me that they were no longer focusing their development efforts on that application since it was based on the Web ADF and the Web ADF was dead… He informed me that they were  moving towards Flex and Silverlight . I was excited at least about the Flex application having spent some time with the ESRI Flex Sample Viewer.  I have a couple of applications out there that are based on the Web ADF one of which will be a lot of fun to migrate and the other we paid a lot of money for this company to develop. The app itself does many things and is useful but it has been holding up our migration efforts for some time. Whenever ESRI releases another version I’m like crap we have to migrate that thing… The fact that it has become that thing says a lot as well. It’s not interactive, its not fun, icons don’t fly across the screen like in the Flex apps and we’re like boring… We’re already tired of the look and feel and want to change things but behind this behemoth are some pretty useful tools that we still can’t replicate on the Flex side with some serious programming effort and money both of which is lacking in our “shop.”

Thus, when I read today that ESRI plans to deprecated the Web ADF…

Based on customer feedback and technology trends, we see the Web ADFs playing a decreasing role amongst ArcGIS Server developers in favor of alternatives such as the ArcGIS Web Mapping APIs.

The Web ADFs will be deprecated in the next release after ArcGIS Server 10.

I was reminded once again of our beloved app. I can migrate the others with not much loss but this one, not sure… the whole thing will have to be re-worked.

Sometime last week I received a message from my favorite GIS Software company AKA  ESRI that ArcGIS 10 was available. I read on with delight until I noticed that it was available for download. I read on and noticed that there was a little bit of  info there for requesting media so I logged on to the customer support portal… I had already requested media from a previous message almost a month ago so I called downstairs to see if any media had arrived. I was told no. I read more on the customer portal and followed the links which BTW took a long time to load in my browser. Heck the long weekend was near so I figured folks were sucking up bandwidth. To my utter annoyance there was a statement saying that backup media was going to take 6 weeks. 6 Weeks? Must be a mistake! I was not happy and mentioned to our ESRI rep in no uncertain terms that this was unacceptable. Given that we are paying over $20K in maintenance per year for the software (the cost of a half time staff which I desperately need), waiting 6 weeks to get media is just ridiculous! So now they are dividing customers with low bandwidth and high bandwidth first they stopped shipping us a nice box with media and users guide I actually used those things now we have to download our help files and users guide and now we have to download these large files which does not play well with our IT folks at all. No they are not happy when I download large files during regular working hours… When you add  ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server and the extensions that we need to download that is some serious bandwidth and sorry to say but its not like their servers are as fast as the Google Servers  even loading their " free basemaps” to use in our web apps  is a hog on our server…

I just think its a shame that ESRI has chosen to treat its paying customers this way. If you have large bandwidth you can have ArcGIS 10 now. If you have not its a 6 week wait for you. Sucks! I won’t repeat what my colleague called them when I relayed this bit of info.

My oh My! Its been a while since I updated this blog. I’ve been busy to say the least. Since my last post the iPhone 4 is on preorder, iOS 4 is out with over 100 new features even for us 3G and 3GS users, oh and the Mac Mini has a bit of refresh with its new Unibody self. Bummer its no longer available for $599 entry price it seems to have gone up by $100 (what’s up with that?) Apparently BP repositioned a containment cap on the underwater gulf gusher that’s been causing all kinds of health problems and other issues for those folks living in the affected areas. Hope that the cap holds this time. We’re worried about oil around these parts ourselves mainly gas drilling and hydrofracking.

So what have I been doing these past months. I’ve been diving into the ESRI Flex World a bit mainly for work and also just getting some away time from my computer. Its been fun but I’m seriously wiped out. I’m off to get some shut-eye long day tomorrow. One more thing… there are now 4 groundhogs that have taken up residence on my property we have a bit of an understanding so they stick to the un-mowed areas of the grass. At some point there will be too many of these creatures to manage so I’m looking into a way to deal with their case…

 We finally migrated to ArcGIS Server 9.3.X end of last week, so when one of my colleagues wanted to update a previous  ArcIMS based application, I thought I would get my hot sticky hands all over it and port it to ArcGIS Server myself. Not a bad idea but the ArcGIS Server out-of-the-box tools are sparse to say the least. For example, BUFFER… I’m all kinds of wishing that I had Geocortex Essentials to port this app. Could seriously use some of those extra tools.

I spent the last couple of days of my work life trying to get a sample buffer tasks to work. Man the WebADF is a beast. I followed install instruction for the task to the letter and at first I got an error saying that I did not set the “max buffer distance.” Several searches and downloads later I opened up Visual Web Developer Express, found the offending value in the default.aspx file and took care of the problem. I’m no programmer so this took me a few hours to find, download, and fix. Next time I ran the buffer task again, error number 2… “The Geometry Server is not pointing to the right place…” Crud took care of that real quick. I was playing with ArcGIS Server Manager all day so I remembered where this was. Finally, I ran the buffer task again! This time to my utter annoyance I received the same error I did yesterday late evening… something about Identity needing the proper permission, object variable not set, blah blah! I rolled my eyes something awful and went back to my DBA work… I think at this point I will wait for my programming buddies to take a shot at that one. They all did the sensible thing and left the office for the holidays. There I was being all inspired… at least now I have a greater empathy and appreciation for my programming friends who have to deal with the WebADF all day long. To the programming elves at Fountain Spatial (you know who you are) thanks alot!

  I’ve been using Xtools before it became Xtools Pro Extension for ArcGIS and have been happy as pie with many of the free tools that were offered. I had some major table restructuring to do back in June/July and decided to download the latest version (5.3.) I found the table restructure and other tools quite useful so I took the plunge and decided to order the product. Infact, I was so excited about the new tools, I ordered one copy for me and another for my colleague. I went about doing my work and found some other useful tools there and was sending an email to someone who was interested in some of the tools there so I went to the site to copy and paste the URL and noticed that version 6 had been released.  Thinking that this upgrade was free after all we had just bought the previous version beginning of June, I downloaded and upgrade. 45 days later I got a message that the trial period had expired and that I needed a new license key. I contacted tech support and they told me that I needed to purchase an upgrade for $65. I emailed them and told them that we had just purchased the product in early June. They sent me the note from their website “ Users purchased XTools Pro 5.x after June, 22 may apply for free upgrade to XTools Pro 6.0.” which was not there at the time I downloaded the update to my knowledge. They must have had other customers asking for updated keys and posted that little note recently. The product was $175 per license and now they want another $65 per license which means that we would have paid $240 per license within 30 days of the original purchase.  Sounds like predatory pricing to me! The least that they can do is give customers who purchased the product in the last 30-90 days a free upgrade to the next release.  I use another product (ET Geowizards) by a company called ET Spatial Techniques and their upgrade policy includes free upgrades to current release within  a year of purchase. That policy makes more sense to me and I think that I will be sticking with them from now on. I will miss the extract map tool and the ease of the table restructure tool although ET Geowizard has a similar tool for restructuring tables. The new metadata tool was also helpful. I hate it when Software companies do this sort of thing to their customers.

Update: On Friday I received an email from the company informing me that most of their customers don’t have an issue with their upgrade policy and reminded me that I had missed the deadline for the upgrade offer (I still think that they released the product less than 30 days after I had purchased it). They offered me a "free" upgrade for one of the license if I bought the upgrade for the other one. So that means I would have to give them another $65. I thanked them for the offer and informed them that my software budget is basically frozen for the year due to the economic situation in our organization and elsewhere. Haven’t heard anything else yet!