I have to admit it I have a problem with dates. I always seem to draw a blank when trying to remember them; I’ve outsourced much of my anniversary notification to outlook and my iPhone, or work with them in applications. It has been ironic this week as the last decade ends and the next decade begins that the first thing that stumps me is a little date problem. A choice of dates I’ve been doing some development using the Silverlight API and I came to the part of the project where I needed to filter data using a date range and display on the map and in graph (or chart) form. Now querying with dates...

I was giving a presentation at an ESRI gathering hosted in reading at Microsoft this week, talking about all things Silverlight and MapIt, and very little unsurprisingly about the Flex API. During a presentation about the Web API’s I mentioned JavaScript and Silverlight as two offerings that whilst can do similar things, need to be considered carefully in relation to the audience in questioning and the tasks they wish to perform. Now I like the Silverlight API and as I mentioned in the talk it can really allow for the avoidance of browser support pain by abstracting away the layer between your...

As you can see I’m not one for short posts, but sometimes a great article needs to be pimped. Smashing Magazine has lots of those and whilst I’m mostly a Web Developer and not a Web Designer (I do have an iPhone so there may be hope for me) it’s good to keep an eye on the current design trends for web applications. Smashing, super, great, well not so great with IE6. Their current article “CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8” is a change from the normal rant at Microsoft fare, but aims at understanding all the differences that occur in the Microsoft browser segment of the market...

To celebrate the upgrading of the JavaScript API to 1.5 I decided to have a little play with adding a where are you from page to the site (you can get too it from the page link above). This is a little routine to take your IP address and geo-locate where you are. It’s a very simple application in the style of Al Pascual’s Map Stats Silverlight application that you can get here. In fact it’s almost the same, except it works with Dojo uses a different IP geolocator from IPInfoDB as the one used by Al didn’t know places like New Zealand existed. It was an interesting application to write, not...

I had a query today about the system requirements of MapIt. For those of you who don’t know what MapIt is yet I point towards the link above, it’s a great product for a certain market, especially those Microsoft partners who want to make use of their data within SQL Server 2008 with all of the spatial bells and whistles available. Jithen gives a good overview of what you get out of the box here including the system requirements on the ESRI wiki site. Many people will hopefully be buying or evaluating MapIt over the next few months and should keep an eye on a number of the requirements....