My slide decks are now online at http://Slideshare.com/dbouwman – interestingly, the unit testing one got selected as a “Presentation of the Day” by SlideShare (thanks!), and is on the main page! Sometimes it’s good to use a really goofy image on your title slide!

You can watch them over at slideshare, or right here:

You can also check out Brian Noyle’s ASP.NET MVC slides at http://slideshare.com/bnoyle

Thanks for a Great Conference

Thanks to everyone who stopped to say hello, and who made it out to the early morning session today! For those who did not make it to the conference, all the sessions and user presentations will be on the ESRI Media center some time next week – be sure to check out the keynote by David Chappell – it was fantastic. I’ll post direct links to my talks – while I tried to make these slide decks “readable”, the audio will certainly help a lot.

Quick notes from the ArcGIS Explorer (E3) Build 900 session with Andy MacDonald & Jeff Jackson – same content will be presented on Wednesday afternoon…

As I’m sure others have noted, it’s a total rebuild from the current ArcGIS Explorer (build 500) – so it’s quite different – ribbon and 2D/3D support being the most immediately obvious. It also has a presentation mode that is going to enable some very creative uses of live GIS in meetings & at conferences.

There is a very nice configuration tool that lets you chance splash screen, base map, and add/remove elements from the UI.

But – I think that the developer experience is a major change – it’s a native .NET API that hides all the ArcObjects COM “goo” that’s behind the scenes. The API looks very clean, and well thought out. One thing of note is that it uses generics, which may be a little daunting to some, but streamlines the API… as in…

Application.ActiveMapDisplay.Map.GetMapItems<typeOfItem>()

which fetches all map items of the specified type. This is much cleaner than having a bunch of collections to hold each type. API was apparently developed by writing example code, and then creating the API to enable that code. Led to clean API, and likely a much more intuitive developer experience (that’s the idea anyhow!)

ESRI followed .NET design guidelines, so this should be a very “.NET” developer experience. Not QI’ing from interface to interface – apparently there are no interfaces – just .NET classes… no Object Models shown, but the model seems pretty streamlined just from the intellisense. 5 namespaces for devs… lean. UI layer is auto-updated – no need to manually refresh map after doing something to it – big departure from ArcMap.

- Hugely streamlined Query API as compared to COM. Nice data binding capabilities, with support for CodedValueDomains cooked in (woot!)…

- Debug Add-In’s by using the “Start External Program” in Visual Studio.

Add-In Configuration:

No big surprise here, config is via XML files, which separate the UI needs (the button graphic, tooltip etc) from the implementation – this allows the UI to be built without actually loading the assembly. This will greatly improve application loading time if you have a lot of Add-Ins.

Add-In Types:

Button, DockableWindows, Galleries and Extensions

Just inherit and override methods as needed. Jeff Jackson showed a fair bit of very clean code.

Extensions are background, non-UI stuff – how you could tie in live feeds or custom data formats. They run on background threads, and you can update OnStartup() and on ShutDown()

Lots of samples in the SDK.

Can use any Visual Studio SKU – including Express…

Very cool stuff – kudos to the folks who have been working on this project!

Before I pack my bags and fly out on Sunday, I thought I’d shoot of the details of the talks I’ve giving at the 2009 ESRI Developer Summit.

Unit Testing 101

This is a user session, on Tuesday afternoon, at 4:00-4:45pm in the ESRI Showcase area. As I understand it, this one will have the audio and screen recorded, and will be served by ESRI at some point in the future. I’d also recommend catching Brian Noyle’s talk – “Building RESTful Applications and Services with ASP.NET MVC”, as well as the illustrious James Fee who will give us all a peek at the cool stuff he’s cooking up down in Tempe.

Developing for the GeoWeb: Notes from the Field

This one is Thursday, March 26, 2009, from 8:30am-9:45am in the Pasadena/Ventura/Sierra (Wyndham)

This talk will have full video recording, which will be very interesting as I’ve never see myself give a talk before – gulp!

I hope to post the slide decks on slideshare immediately following the talks – they’ll be at http://slideshare.com/dbouwman

I hope to see you all at the Dev Summit – if you see me wandering around, please stop and say Hello – it’s always great to meet my readers and hear about what you are doing.

For those not attending this year, I’ll be blogging notes from sessions – I’m going to try to hit the ArcGIS Explorer Build 900 sessions, as well as the Silverlight and Flex sessions. Other than that I’ll be milling around, talking to all sorts of people.

In past years at the Developer Summit’s there has been an informal blogger meet-up on the Monday night – it was a good chance to meet all the people you interact with on-line, and kick off the week.

This year, DTSAgile – the software division of Data Transfer Solutions (who I work for) – is hosting a blogger/twitter/geo-lackey party. Basically if you are attending the Dev Summit, and are looking for something to do on Monday night, you are invited. All we ask is that you RSVP by this Friday (March 20th) so we have a good idea about numbers so we can gauge beer and food requirements.

What: Party – Free Beer & Burgers. We have a pool, but I’m guessing it will be a little chilly (not heated)

When: Monday March 23rd 6:00pm till you leave

Where: DTSAgile condo in Palm Springs (~1/2 mile north of the Convention center – we’ll email the exact address later this week, after you RSVP).

Who: You and your traveling posse.

RSVP Here: http://www.dtsagile.com/Events/DevSummit

Hope to see you there!

I’m giving two talks at the 2009 ESRI Developer Summit conference coming up in a few weeks.

One session is a “Notes from the Field” talk that will be focused on designing sites for the GeoWeb, and the other will be a “user talk” on Unit Testing.

Since I’ve been doing an informal series of posts on presenting, I thought I’d do a few posts about how I create my slide decks and prepare for the talks.

Envisioning

For me, one of the most difficult parts of a talk is getting all my interesting “tidbit ideas” sorted out into a coherent whole that has a sensible flow. As most good books on presenting will tell you – it’s best to start analog. I use post-it notes and sharpie markers.

This is what the outline for my “Notes from the Field” talk looks like. The post-it colors do not mean anything special other than I ran out of orange pretty early on. And although there are only ~20 post-it’s this will expand into ~100-150 slides.

At this point I’m just mapping out concepts, key points and some visual ideas that I may integrate. No doubt it will be a packed 45 minutes, but it will be interesting. I’ll post more over the coming weeks.

Ok, this is just photos of our build rather than any sort of a step-by-step “Atwood-esque” guide. If you want to build your own boxes, I highly recommend these posts by Jeff Atwood: Building a PC Part II, and Building a PC Part III

But, onto the pics! (I apologize for the quality – iPhone is better than most phone-cameras, but is no match for any point & shoot)

The drop off from UPS. Always a nice sight…

Unpacked goodies waiting to get built…

Start with the mother-boards – love the motherboard heat-sinks!

The hardest part of building a PC is getting the CPU fan snapped into the mother board. You have to apply waaaaay more pressure than you thing is good for it. The upside is that once it’s in-place, the rest is gravy.

Once the CPU is on the mother board, we loaded them into the cases. Just screw it down, and you’re good to go.

I knew these were serious video cards (512Mb each, and two go into each box), but this box makes me think this may be serious overkill for Visual Studio!

And, a quick 2 hours of work later, we’ve got everything loaded into the cases, and OS’s being installed.

After a suggestion from Glenn Goodrich (ruprict.wordpress.com) Mike and Jeff have opted to go with Windows Server 2008 as their workstation OS. I guess it’s like Vista without the painful parts. There is a blog (http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/) all about what you need to do to run Windows 2008 as a workstation. And to jump in with both feet – they are also doing the x64 version. We’ll let you know how this goes with the ESRI software!

But before we get to installing apps and other fun stuff, it was time to burn them in. For this, we followed Jeff Atwood’s guidance, and run multiple instances of Prime95. So for 4 cores, we run 4 instances. For those who have not tired this before it’s pretty cool to see your box pinned at 100% – unfortunately with out any other software on the box, it’s pretty hard to get a screen cap of the process manager pinned.

While this is going, we also run CoreTemp (note – get the x64 version if you are on x64 or very weird things happen) which reports back the core temperatures.

And then we basically go home and let them run all night. 

When we came in the next morning, after ~18 hours at 100%, the CPU’s were around 70 degrees C. Not enough to cause the system to shut-down, but if we were going to over-clock, we’d need some after market CPU cooling systems.

So – that’s about all there was to the build. Sure we had the interesting issues with how to route cables and a few brief moments of confusion when we powered up the systems and were met with blank screens (we forgot to plug in the CPU power connectors – doh!) but all in all, building a PC from parts is a great way to get a ripping box, while still saving a ton of cash. Other than the burn-in, the whole process – from unpacking boxes to OS installed – was about 3 hours of time. Loading up a full PC’s worth of software is another issue!