From the Silverlight Team...
Well we made it to beta one! We have had a great time developing this first Silverlight Edition beta and we hope you enjoy working with it. As this is the first beta, I wanted to take a little time to explain our goals and vision for the product.
Silverlight marks an important point in Microsoft's development platform history, as we finally get to write .NET code... (read more)
Posted 04-09-2009 05:31 AM by ThinkGeo
Thanks to everyone who attended the "Extending Map Suite: Creating Custom Styles" webinar on March 11th! In case you missed this in-depth technical discussion with ThinkGeo Map Suite guru David Rehagen, you can download a video recording of the presentation, as well as a sample project (in both C# and VB.NET) that will help you start creating your own Styles quickly. ... (read more)
Posted 03-12-2009 06:22 AM by ThinkGeo
Map Suite 3.0 has the ability to edit existing ShapeFiles, but what if you want to create your own? The code below should get you started, but if you want to explore more ShapeFile editing, check out our EditShapeFile sample application included with the evaluation download. Additionally, if you're using Map Suite Web Edition, you can download the attached sample application at the end of this a... (read more)
Posted 03-05-2009 11:29 PM by ThinkGeo
This extension allows you to control styles by evaluating complex expressions from FeatureSource column data and also your own custom variables. With it, you can create powerful styles that do things such as color certain features differently based on an expression. To accomplish this, We use the Flee (Fast Lightweight Expression Evaluator) package. ... (read more)
Posted 02-25-2009 06:28 AM by ThinkGeo
One of the great new features in Map Suite 3.0 is the ability to create your own custom styles to get the exact look and feel you want for your maps. If you'd like to learn how easy it is to design your own custom styles, our free webinar on March 11th will tell you everything you need to know to make them work for you! ... (read more)
Posted 02-21-2009 12:29 AM by ThinkGeo
I wanted to get your feedback on a new PDF extension we are working on. The extension allows you to print your maps into a vector PDF. I think you will find the extension flexible and easy to use.
To implement this extension, we created a new class called PdfGeoCanvas that inherits from the abstract class GeoCanvas. We put the logic in there and because of that, we can easily draw all of our... (read more)
Posted 02-11-2009 12:24 AM by ThinkGeo
I wanted to share with you some code we worked on for Tom, one of our forum guests. He is working with an InMemoryFeatureLayer that has tens of thousands of objects in it. With this amount, it was quite slow to draw because we calculated the bounding boxes for each record in real time. To help solve his problem, we created this neat IndexedInMemoryFeatureLayer and IndexedInMemoryFeatureSource. ... (read more)
Posted 02-10-2009 08:04 AM by David
To follow up my earlier post on the DictionaryValueStyle, here is a variation. This CachedValueStyle allows you to pre-cache the column values for each Feature. This is handy if the values you want to use are from an external data source. It uses the same base as the DictionaryValueStyle, so it is efficient with many ValueItem objects.
To use this, what you need to do is add items to the Val... (read more)
Posted 02-10-2009 04:43 AM by David
We had a user report that the ValueStyle was quite slow when there were thousands of ValueItem objects. While we never intended it to be used this way, we were up to the challenge. Below is an example of how to write your own Style and to also solve this problem. It is impossible for us to have prior knowledge of every scenario that you as developers face, given that it is just as impossible fo... (read more)
Posted 02-10-2009 03:14 AM by David
We have just released a new version of Map Suite Desktop Edition. This is a stop-gap release to get around the threading issues that regrettably affected so many of you. In this release, we've added a ThreadingMode to the map control. By default, this is set to SingleThread. The multi-thread option still has issues and we are working on that. This build should enable those that regressed to the fi... (read more)
Posted 02-09-2009 06:05 AM by David
By popular demand we have integrated Google Maps with our various Map Suite editions. As this technology is very new, we do not yet have samples built into the "How Do I" sample applications. To mitigate this, you will find below some samples of how to integrate the technology into the Services & Desktop editions of Map Suite. ... (read more)
Posted 01-26-2009 03:36 AM by David
Fellow developers, we have a bunch of new releases out today. In this post I'll detail some of the highlights from across the products. We've introduced proper 64-bit support, Google Static Map API support, much greater API stability, and lots more. There's a complete list of changes inside, plus a little taste of what's coming next. ... (read more)
Posted 01-23-2009 12:08 AM by David
This post will focus on a request we get from time to time, which is scaling a point image based on the map scale. The effect is that at a certain reference scale the image is its proper size, but as you zoom out the image gets smaller and as you zoom in the image gets larger.
I wanted to share the implementation with you and show you just how easy it is to create your own styles with Map Suite... (read more)
Posted 12-11-2008 10:44 AM by David
Thanks to everyone who attended the "Intro to Map Suite Desktop Edition 3.0" webinar on December 10th! ThinkGeo President and CEO Clint Batman provided an overview of Desktop Edition 3.0 and showcased many of the great new capabilities of this latest version. Development team lead and Map Suite guru David Rehagen was also on hand to answer technical questions about functionality and features. ... (read more)
Posted 12-11-2008 01:31 AM by ThinkGeo
One of the most requested features left out of Map Suite 3.0 is MapShapes. For those who are not familiar with MapShapes, in Map Suite 2.0 they were a group of self-contained features that had their own styles, projection and column data. This meant that each one could be unique; however, this also meant you had to specify all of the attributes about each single MapShape. ... (read more)
Posted 12-02-2008 05:29 AM by David