I was excited when I heard about the “Denver ESRI Developers User Group Meeting” down at the ESRI Denver offices. So, today, a colleague and I drove 50 miles down there to attend. Since ESRI seems to be trying to beef up their outreach to the “Developer” community (release of ESRI Developer Network, the Developer Summit etc), I had high hopes for this event.
After taking our seats, and a couple of introductions, the presenters put up the Agenda slide (paraphrased as I did not take detailed notes)
Section 1: Developer Resources
- online help
- support.esri.com
- EDN site
Section 2: Building a Tool
- develop a customization for ArcMap in a COM language
We packed up and left after about 5 minutes. It just was not worth our time. In my mind, what they presented today is about as basic as you can get as a “developer” working with ESRI tools. This is stuff you should cover in the first hour or two of doing development with ArcObjects and ArcMap. If this was a “Intro to ArcGIS customization” seminar, this would be fine, but it’s a “Developer User Group” – we expected more. While I knew that they were not going to touch on automated generation of Geodatabase schemas via XML or other esoteric topics, I had hoped that they would at least show off what can be done if you dig a little deeper – class extensions & object inspectors, ArcEngine applications, ArcGIS Server web services etc. Nope. Basic ArcMap.
Before I go any further, I think that the content of the meeting was perfect for most of the audience. When asked who was currently using VBA to customize ArcMap, the majority put up their hands, so an intro to COM customization is not too far off for them.
However, if this is an indication of ESRI’s understanding of the “developer” community expectations, it raises some serious concerns for me. Particularly for the Developer Summit. At this point, I’m putting my plans to attend on hold until some sort of agenda is posted so we know what we’re getting with this. We can’t affort to take 4 developers out of the office, fly them to Palm Springs, put them up, only to have the summit be focused on the intro level VBA/VB6 COM. And I’d expect that no other development shops can either. We are professional software developers, and I’d expect this summit to be aimed at, or have a track for experienced developers. If not, there is no way we can attend.
Suggestions for Denver Developer User GroupI suggest that the agenda for meetings be posted online, with a suggested experience level for the topics. This will help people decide if it’s worth their time to attend. A suggestion for dealing with groups with a variety of experience levels: have two sections – a fundamentals section which deals with the basics, and an advanced topic which covers things the experienced users would be interested in. This works very well at the Northern Colorado .NET users group.
