Developer Summit d1, Plenary Session!

Well the Business Partner Conference has come and gone pretty quickly. A few important things mentioned in the Plenary Session as I blogged about it here: http://se7en.co.nz/cms/scrappad/archive/2007/03/19/business-partner-conference-plenary-session.aspx but apart from nothing there was nothing spectacular I have heard about it.

So it was onto the Developer Summit which kicked off today in Palm Springs. There were a few things mentioned at the Plenary Session with a number of people presenting and taking part. The Plenary Session was for both the Developer Summit and the Business Partner Conference attendees along with International Distributors. Rob estimates there was around about 2000 people at the session which is pretty impressive!

So what were some of the highlights?

• Service packs will start including additional functionality as a means to ship updates prior to major releases. Mainly focused on ArcGIS Server.

This is kind of cool. Microsoft moved away from this idea and has always mentioned they will not add new features into SP’s. I see ESRI is continuing down this route. I guess for ESRI this will work. Unlike Microsoft, follow up versions are a lot slower so adding additional functionality in SP’s would be the way to go J.

Scott Moorehouse talked about the ESRI architecture side of things. This was mainly and update of what’s coming and what’s happening.

So what’s new? Well I mentioned some of things in yesterday’s write up and it looks like it has been carried through.

• Fixes to some of the top priority bugs and improvements to the documentation.
• The overhaul of the ArcGIS Desktop interface. This is to include to new look “ribbon” which Microsoft Outlook 2007 sports. This will be interesting. I have to say it takes a while to get used to everything! Would be great to see them making use of WPF though.
• Review and improve some of the code components which include the geodatabase, graphics and the mapping side of things.

Scott mentioned that right now ESRI is working in 2 development “modes” or tracks. Basically they are focusing on ArcGIS 9.3 and ArcGIS 10. It was good to see some more information come out about this.

What’s new in ArcGIS 9.3? Pretty much the same things I mentioned yesterday, also there will be more OGC support and I noticed Dave Bouwman mentioned Microsoft Windows Vista support for the desktop. He didn’t mention anything about ArcGIS Server? Dave can you confirm this? I have been able to get ArcGIS Server working on Microsoft Windows Vista, but it has been a nightmare!

What’s new in ArcGIS 10? Ha, I been wanting to hear some of things for a while now and they have finally been mentioned.

• Multi-threading support for multi-core chips. Yes! This is mainly around geoprocessing and displaying side of things.
• Finally we will get 64 bit support so you can make use of the 64 bit CPU’s you bought years ago!
• New course grained ArcObjects. Will be interesting to see what these will be.
• A new open API for the file geodatabase. This looks interesting. I’m sure many people will like this idea.
• Update to graphics engines. This is definitely needed. It’s been a while since they did anything in this area and where we are right now with graphics they need an overhaul in this department.
• New performance improvements to the geoprocessing framework. Another great improvement to see. This will help in speeding things up!

Scott also mentioned the conceptual architecture will remain the same and as I guessed it correctly its mainly going to be a modernisation of the code base.

As you can imagine there were many demos shown. ESRI now has a new “idea” or shall I say motto for ArcGIS Server.

“Author, Serve, Use”

Interesting line! I guess this sums up how simple they are trying to make things. Dave Wraizen who is the ArcGIS Server Product Manager lead most of the presentations. I hear there was also an enterprise integration presentation by Jay Thedore who is the ArcGIS Server Java Development Lead. Rob also mentions:

“This was one of the first real demos I’ve seen of a SOA and how everything fits together”

Other demos included the mobile SDK and working with smart clients and ArcGIS Server. I bet this was some cool stuff. Mobile demos are always cool! There were also demos on ArcGIS Explorer!

The final section of the Plenary Session focused mainly on ArcGIS Online with an introduction to some of the services been offered there and also some of the API’s available to use with ArcWeb Services.

Sounds like a pretty interesting day overall. For me, I’m very interested in ArcGIS 9.3 and ArcGIS 10 and some of the improvements coming there. As I get more information from people I will post them. As the sessions have started, I’m interested in hearing about how some of them went and some of the things that were talked about.

Most of the information posted here was sourced from Dave Bouwman and Rob Elkin’s blogs. So thanks for keeping us updated guys. Looking forward to hearing more about how things are going there. J