Whilst this post might have more to do with a game played with leather and willow to a guy who lives in a part of the world that could only accommodate ice cricket for most of the year, well to be honest the UK isn’t much better for cricketing weather either but that’s beside the point, it’s actually about this years ESRI’s Developers Summit which I was lucky enough to attend this year in Palm Springs. To ArcGIS 10 and beyond! The 2010 #DevSummit was a cornucopia of new technologies and online systems rolling out towards the release of ArcGIS 10. Even though I work for a distributor there was...

I should caveat this post with the often used phrase, ‘don’t try this at home kids’. When tinkering with the guts of any system and modifying the information being sent to and from a service by ‘hacking’ into the request pipeline of a message your opening up a whole can of performance and stability worms that need a great deal of testing under load to understand the direct effect on the scalability of any site. A Simple Question This post is based upon a question I had with a customer at our recent DeveloperHub conference in Birmingham. He asked how it would be possible to watermark an image...

As we all know the pace of change in technology shows no sign of abating for good or ill. In software terms it’s a continual moving walkway of new patches, version and features, usually for the better sometime not so. I’m both lucky and cursed to be able to install a wide variety of new software where I work and at this moment installing a beta of ArcGIS 9.4 (or 10 as it will soon be) onto a new copy of Windows Server 2008 R2. I’ll soon be downloading and installing a copy of Visual Studio 2010 onto that virtual machine as well. Lucky eh? Well yes and no, lucky because I get to try out new...

It might come as a shock to many of you, but often on the internet the world is flat. Yes I know that you thought this whole debate had gone out with the ark (or actually a little later), but after years coming to terms of the world being a sphere, cartographers everywhere needed a method of putting that world  down onto paper. Now this was fine for many years until 2nd May 2000 the US decided to turn off Selective Availability and whole world seemingly brought into WGS84. The difficulty here though is the fact that WGS84 and Longitude and Latitude coordinates are an approximate representation of...

Over the last few weeks I’ve been having a few adventures in the world of Silverlight. A bit like Alice I’ve been following white rabbits down holes and through looking glasses. What I’ve discovered is that having an IDE doesn’t always make things easier, especially when the error is occurring somewhere between the chair and the keyboard, a place which is notoriously hard to debug. Brain don’t fail me now One issue I have is with my brain. If you start thinking as if the development environment is going to help you, then when it doesn’t it can completely throw the processes you use to...