ESRI Dev Summit is much quieter than ESRI UC, for obvious reason of lower count of attendees. It’s usually held in Palm Springs Convention Center.
Palm Springs CC was most likely (forgive me for not checking Wikipedia) built during the shiny days of city’s glory, when all Hollywood hotshots loved to spend their weekends here. The style is unmistakable. Now about the favorite topic of every convention crasher – free food. Free food was in abundance. I was there only for one day (Wed Mar 24 2010), for that day ESRI provided free boxed lunch, drinks and snacks before and after lunch and free dinner (including beer and wine) on Dev Summit Attendee party. Beer was from Hangar 24, my favorite local brewery, and food was definitely of acceptable quality.
I attended several sessions presented by my colleagues, also had a good deal of talks in exhibit hall. (Exhibit hall is so small cozy that notion of ‘islands’ was close to non-existence, let’s just say I was there for significant chunk of my day).
Dev Summit is like boot camp for developers who want to get a glimpse of ArcGIS 10 early. Pre-release will be available soon and there’s plenty of other related activity happening – dev APIs are getting public as well.
My colleagues and friends Julio Andrade and Rex Hansen delivered a great presentation about extending ArcGIS Server .Net with custom Server Object Extensions. I helped to write some of the related code (JSON/AMF reading/writing), so I attended as a volunteer cheerleader. I couldn’t find the session recording online, but I think it’s going to be available soon for attendees (if not for everyone.)
Julio did great job with helper objects in REST SOESupport assembly. As a result, SOAP and REST SOE samples were concise and clear. If you are curious, these samples will be available from the code gallery for 10. Again, no link yet. Check server blog from time to time.
Note to myself: raw access to IJSONWriter, IJSONReader is probably will be of some interest to people writing AGS SOEs, especially in C++. I should write separate posts about details of these new public interfaces.
One attendee asked me what SOE he should develop – SOAP or REST? Obviously REST, if you are creating web app for browser consumption. If you need SOAP, you can add it later to the same SOE.
Next session of note: Roop Goyal and Sud Menon presented “Editing Geodatabases over the Web Using ArcGIS Server“. Feature Service is pretty cool if you ask me. (Again, no recording available yet.).
