I am already familiar with Silverlight programming but not have any experience with GIS.
my role as silverlight developer is only to display existing GIS data.
If you guys have any experience with arcGIS silverlight control & api, what else do you think I must learn to be able to use it.
any learning reference could be helpful. thanks.
you don't need alot, you can dl the SDK from ESRI and then check out thier help site they have crap-loads of examples, both downloadable source and live samples (with the source code). If you have a license, you can use bing maps in the ESRI silverlight control--there are assemblies in the SDK for that.
as an aside, the SDK also includes the WPF assemblies as well.
It helps to have a basic understaind of the ESRI Map and Graphics object model for any of their API's (they all have similarities). The Silverlight API is much simpler than the Arcobjects API, but shares many of the same patterns.
If you are performing specific operations (such as distance calculations, map annotating, etc) there may be very specific concepts that will help. Can you post a question with more details about your goal?
I have made some different projects that used GIS data. I haven't tried arcGIS but used Bing Maps (http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/maps/archive/2009/03/18/introducing-the-virtual-earth-silverlight-map-control.aspx) and a Silverlight component from ThinkGeo (http://gis.thinkgeo.com/Microsite1/MapSuiteSilverlight2/tabid/709/Default.aspx?adcampaign=Map+Suite+Silverlight+Edition&leadsource=Google&adgroup=Silverlight+General&adtype=search&keyword=silverlight+map&gclid=CIu976aW0Z0CFZ1h4wodwGsDsA).
I think that Bing Maps is really easy to work with and there is lots of help available online. Maybe that can help you with some starting resources to argGIS?!
Chris is right. The help site has enough samples. I don't have Silverlight skills, so I really struggled with it and I was pretty bad at it too. I think the silverlight learning curve is much steeper.
I tried to wire up GIS tools/buttons to a ribbon control. It sort of worked, a silverlight dev would do a better job:
View esri-silverlight-toc-png
If you just need to control visibility, between services. It's real easy. Or if you have one service, with layers inside that you need to control...that's easy too.
But if you need both, you will have to roll your own layer control. I wired it up to a treeview, but it doesn't look sexy. ESRI may have a better TableofContents control out now, they didn't when I was messing with it:
View esri-silverlight-png
Related
I came across differences between WPF and silverlight over the links in the web but I couldn't find any content regarding the similarities in wpf and silverlight. Can anybody please let me know the common points between the two?
This document goes through the differences and the simialarities between the two. It's 69 pages so a bit of a read, but it should cover what you need.
WPF/Silverlight White Paper on Codeplex
WPF is a more mature technology and was designed with a richer feature set. It also has the advantage of being able to run in a browser or as an installed Windows-Form-type app.
Silverlight has a broader reach. You can access Silverlight from many operating systems and web browsers.
The most important reason to choose one over the other should be based on the intended audience for the application.
See this link to get more information. Check this also.
I somehow missed the introduction of DataAnnotations. I’ve been looking at them off and on for the last couple of weeks. It seems like everything I’m finding ties back to MVC. Are there any full implementations for doing validation with WPF, WinForms, etc.?
If so, any pointers/links would be appreciated.
If not, are there plans to introduce integrated support in the future?
My current interests lie in WPF so that's really what I'm looking for.
TIA
Karl Shifflett from the Microsoft patterns and practices team has a detailed video on how to use the Data Annotations attributes in WPF. His source code is available via a link at the bottom of his blog post on his Stuff demo application.
Data Annotations is a nice middle ground between that and the ad-hoc validation one would normally see in the WPF books and tutorials and the more powerful Enterprise Validation Application Block that #Evan Larsen mentioned above. Plus, as you noticed, using Data Annotations allows for sharing of models with ASP.NET applications.
Regarding WPF, DataAnnotations support is not built in, but it shouldn't be too difficult to hook in to your own app.
The demo app of my open source library PDX shows one way to do it, but the documentation for 0.2 isn't quite finished yet :)
Here's another way to do it: http://babaandthepigman.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/wpf-commanding-and-data-annotations-validation/
I have WPF Application. Is it possible to quickly convert WPF app to Silvelight application, if not which technic I have to use to transform my WPF app to Silverlight. And also I want to know about limitations of Silvelight app.
Thank you in advance.
Yes its possible to quickly convert a WPF application to Silverlight, for example:-
<TextBlock Text="Hello, World" />
will convert with hardly any changes. Does that help? Clearly not. It really does depend on how much stuff from WPF your app uses that isn't in Silverlight.
You should read through the WPF Compatibility section of the Silverlight documentation to assess how much of your WPF application will port to Silverlight.
What are the limitations of a Silverlight app? Well it can't make a decent cup of tea I know that. Seriously thats far too broad a question. Define what sort of things the app does and that'll guide the advice you get.
For example, is it a LOB app? Does need access to the local file system? Does it depend on third-party components? etc.
I am about to start on a project where I need to display maps with cross streets and possibly directions. I know there are a lot of API for the web, but I was wondering what the best solution is for a desktop application.
I know of Bing Maps and I believe there are some Google Maps solutions out there as well. Any help or information on good mapping API's would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
You should look at using the ESRI mapping controls. It's nice, relatively easy to use, lots of samples (mostly in silverlight, but thats easy to convert), and has the power of ESRI. What could be better?
if you have a bing maps developer key, you can even use the bing tiles.
I have a data structure that represents a directed graph and I'm looking for a good Silverlight visualisation to allow me to navigate from node to node, preferably with some nice animation.
Does anyone know of any good UI controls or frameworks for this kind of display? Even a sample from another field (maybe a social network?). My graphs don't have many nodes so performance won't be an issue.
I've seen the Prefuse library for Java (and Flash) which would be ideal. The "Degree of Interest" visualisation is the kind of thing I'm after, but I can't find anything in Silverlight.
Thanks for any tips.
There's an open source option that's part of the Silverlight Bag-O-Tricks. Check it out and see a demo here (use the first demo link):
http://www.codeplex.com/BagOTricks
There's also a WPF version:
http://j832.com/bagotricks/
Try this one
http://graphlight.codeplex.com/
I made a graph library for Silverlight, that uses Dot as basis.
Please check out: http://dot2silverlight.codeplex.com/
I am making some improvements to support more shapes and types of arrows.
daniela
Must admit I haven't tryed it out yet my self but quickgraph looks promissing
#Rune FS
QuickGraph has no visualisation capabilities, at least not for Silverlight. It just handles the graph data structures and algorithms.
QuickGraph does make it easy to construct a graph and output to Directed Graph Markup Language (DGML) which can be viewed in VS 2010. I just checked in changes to the project and I noticed that it has been designed to be built for inclusion into Silverlight. So perhaps you could use it in conjunction with a silverlight DGML viewer