These two events may end up being the hilights of the conference for me. The .NET SIG, led by Art Haddad looks to be the beginning of some really great changes for the professional developers working with ESRI products. James Fee posted some notes about what went on during the session, but the things I’m really excited about are an ESRI Developer (EDN?) conference, and (hopefully!) a “GotDotNet workspace” type of area on EDN.
EDN ConferenceAs I mentioned in the session – I think that having a mix of ESRI and user presentations at the EDN conference would be really good – trying to focus on “best practices”, or innovative techniques etc more than the vertical market/industry background of your project. And if it was 2-3 days, many more companies could send more of their development teams, instead of one or two representatives to the “User Conference”. This would be fantastic. Workspaces
I think we can all agree that ArcScripts is a nice way to share some code, but not exactly a platform for collaborative development. While we could set up projects on the GotDotNet workspaces, or put things up on SourceForge, it would be nicer (and likely easier) if this was integrated into the EDN site, and possibly into the search (an indexing of “community samples”?) so that you could find these projects as well when searching for ITopologicalOperator (for example). I believe Art also mentioned something about allowing annotation/markup of the EDN content/site, but this was not elaborated on. Would this be via wiki-like functionality? I think this would be a great addition to the site – there certainly are times where I’ve found the documentation lacking, and if the developer community could add comments into the help (or a parallel wiki) we could help improve the doc, and at the same time get the benefit of others experiences without having to dig through 1000′s of forum posts. Another request I’ve had for some time is some kind of limited access to the internal bug database – this would save a lot of time if we could simply search to see if it’s a bug with a workaround before spending a ton of time trying to sort it out ourselves/calling support etc. Likely a tall order, but if you don’t ask, it definitely won’t happen! The blogger meetup was also great – very nice to meet everyone, and put a face to a feed. It was very cool to see a real lot of genuine enthusiasm from everyone out there, and unfortunately I had to bail to attend a party my company was throwing for our clients – oh well, someone has to pay the bills. Hopefully I’ll run into you all again in the last days of the conference, but if not, there’s always RSS.
