Yongzhi and I are just wrapping up a week in Beijing as part of the Canadian Geomatics Science & Technology Partnering Mission to China 2008 delegation.

It has been an interesting week full of meetings and site visits. Being part of the delegation seems to have really opened doors for us at a number of agencies.

Yongzhi is heading to Chengdu (his hometown) for some R&R tomorrow, and I've now got a few days to explore before I fly back to Canada. I travel to Xi'an tomorrow to see the Terracotta Army, after which I return to Beijing. I still can't get over the size of Beijing--I feel like it would take weeks to do justice to the city.

Between the giant new architecture projects I've seen in Dubai and Beijing the last few months, Victoria is starting to feel like a tiny fishing village.

We just got word that 9.3 is now shipping. We should have a 9.3 compliant release of Geocortex Essentials for ArcGIS Server out the door shortly after we receive 9.3 and are able to address any major changes made between the release candidate and the final release.

Today is the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere; the longest day of the year. At our latitude it starts getting dark around 10PM and gets light again at 4:30AM.

Technically, the days do start getting shorter from now on, but this is beside the point (we have more daylight than we know what to do with and in the next few weeks we start to enjoy the best few months of weather all year). I now enjoy saying this too, and never tire of the exasperation from those on whom the irony is lost.

The Optimizer team has been heads down, working towards the first release of Geocortex Optimizer for ArcGIS Server. It's been a great challenge. Like most software projects, there are never enough calendar days to implement the large number of good ideas we would like to incorporate into the product. The textbook I used in a recent project management course suggests that 1 day spent in planning is worth 4 days spent in implementation and testing. Given that I only have 20 business days to finish optimizer implementation, I computed I could stretch my implementation time to 65 days by planning for 15 and implementing for five. Just kidding, Steve.

I like to use UML class and sequence diagrams when designing features. To create them, I've tried both Microsoft Visual Studio and Visio. Visual Studio class diagrams look nice but unfortunately, Visual Studio has no support for sequence diagrams. Visio is ok, but really is more of a drawing tool than a design tool. The UML tool I settled on was Visual Paradigm for UML. It is a full featured, reasonably priced UML tool that despite a few quirks and a number of bugs that I've learned to work around, works quite well. If you're into UML, check it out. It might be what you're looking for.

We've been running webinars for several months now, and judging by the level of attendance we're seeing on a regular basis, people seem to like them.  So much so, we've added several new ones.

If you've attended one, you'll know that we like to show our host's picture (usually one of our account managers) before the webinar starts - it ties into our people-centric culture and gives attendees an idea of who they're talking to.

Steve Maddison is a Latitude account manager based in Toronto, but we don't have a standard staff photo of him yet. A few months back we needed a headshot for his webinars, but were stuck - should we use a hastily scribbled cartoon?  Happy face?  TAFKAP symbol?

The sales team chose Fabio. 

For reference, at right is a shot of Steve in Amsterdam last year on his way to the ESRI European User Conference. If Steve grows his hair out a bit and spends a year or two in a tanning booth, they'd be almost indistinguishable.

Interestingly, not a single person has commented on the photo.

John introduced me to ColorZilla, a neat FireFox add-on, which allows you to sample pixel colors from web sites.

Being able to quickly determine R,G,B values is handy when integrating a web site color palette into your map.

I sometimes go online and order a dozen books at a time. The only cost I consider with a book is my time to read it; I can get through an average book in an evening or two. While it can be hit and miss, the Internet makes it fairly straightforward to distinguish the wheat from the chaff (similarly, I won’t even consider watching a movie now without first reviewing the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes).

Our training team has become overtaxed of late given the significant amount of things our clients want to learn!  This is great from the perspective that our clients are looking to become self-enabled (we do every thing we can to make our users self-sufficient); bad when you consider the amount of travel and overhead this involves as we try to manage our growth.

Solution:  bring workshop oriented Geocortex Essentials and IMF training to locations close to our users, using ready-made training facilities provided by ESRI.

We're announcing three dates and locations to start; a pair of workshops in the United States and one in Europe.  Our goal is to see what kind of response we get and go from there.  Things are looking positive so far; early feedback seems to suggest we need to add some more rooms and dates!

To learn more and to register, visit our new training page.

Thursday last week, we cut a maintenance release of Geocortex IMF.  Version 5.2.1 contains a number of bug fixes and ensures compatibility with ArcIMS 9.2 SP4 and SP5.

If you're using Geocortex IMF with ArcMap Image Server based Map Services, you'll definitely want to get a hold of this release.

Geocortex IMF 5.2.1 is our second product release (following Geocortex Essentials 1.3) available on our new Geocortex Support Center (BETA). Send an email to software@latitudegeo.com with subject line "IMF Support Center Account Request" to request an account.

Most developers, in their never-ending quest for order, seem to spend a lot of time refactoring code. Visual Studio 2008 has a number of functions that take care of common refactoring tasks but they cover only files that are included in projects and work best against source code. While working on the Optimizer project, I recently refactored some code and in the process, changed the name of some tags in our settings files. Some of these files are referenced by our projects but others are deployed elsewhere. I could hunt them all down and change them manually, or I could use a tool to do it for me. My first thought was to use Windows XP search but for whatever reason, it never seems to find all of the files I'm interested in and only has a search feature, not search and replace.  In that regard, I thought the Windows 2000 search function was much better. It always seemed to find what I am looking for.

I ran across a useful utility that does search and replace really well called Windows Grep. It has the usual search options including search using regular expressions, whole word matching and interestingly, also has a Soundex search which will locate all the documents that contain words that sound like a given word. It also has a replace feature that will make a backup copy of changed files, saving you some grief if your global search and replace goes a little too global.

Admittedly, finding the tool took almost as long as manually changing all of my settings files, but looking for the tool and learning how to use it was a whole lot more fun.

Though we announced it last month at our user conference, I want to post briefly about Geocortex Optimizer, our new product for ArcGIS Server we're timing for release around the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego this year.

Geocortex Optimizer is comprised of four distinct modules (think our ArcIMS-generation Geocortex Statistics and Geocortex Uptime products rolled into one, plus more) that will maximize the value and effectiveness of an investment in ESRI’s next-generation web-based GIS foundation. Initial versions will focus on maximizing ArcGIS Server performance and distributed system performance monitoring, with emphasis shifting to ease-of-management and the ROI calculation side of things.

This has been a challenging and exciting project that is really taking shape and that I think is going to appeal to single server organizations, large enterprises, and everyone in between.  Now that the original design is coming to life and the team has some great momentum, we're getting really excited about this product.

Notwithstanding any unforeseen technical hurdles in the next couple iterations, we should be announcing a Beta program fairly soon.  Let us know if you're interested in participating.

With every release of Geocortex Essentials I compare and contrast to previous releases... Although only labelled version 1.3, this actually represents our 16th release of Geocortex Essentials! (1.0 Beta, 1.0, 1.1 Beta 1, 1.1 Beta 2, 1.1 Release, 1.1 Service Pack 1, 1.2 Alpha 1, 1.2 Beta 1, 1.2 Beta 2, 1.2 Release, 1.2.1 Release, 1.2.2 Beta 1, 1.2.2, 1.3 Beta 1, 1.3 Beta 2, 1.3 Release).
 
Taken together, I am amazed at how rapidly this product has evolved in just eighteen months.
 
Anyway, cut last night, Geocortex Essential 1.3 contains some major new features:

• Data Linking: Using ADO.NET, OLEDB and/or ODBC, administrators can define connections to a variety of data sources; including RDBMS, files, Web Services, GeoRSS feeds, and even live links to data sources like Excel spreadsheets. Data sources are abstracted from the administrator; they can be extended to connect to custom data types
• New Print Templates allow administrators to create printable maps with the WYSIWG interface provided by a new desktop tool, Geocortex Report Designer. Print Templates can include the map, overview map, north arrow, scale bar, scale, legend, projection, date/time, and any other configurable text or images. Print Templates can be exported at high resolutions to multiple formats including PDF, RTF, HTML, XLS, TIFF and text.
• The Reporting Engine allows configurable reports to be designed and deployed to Sites to include spatial data, map data, data from external data links, and other sources. Print ready reports can be exported to a variety of formats including PDF, RTF, HTML, XLS, TIFF and text
• We’ve restructured Geocortex Essentials to include a Workflow Engine, built on Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 3.0.  This streamlines application development and allows developers to focus on deploying quick solutions that solve business needs.
• Easy to use interfaces in Geocortex Essentials Manager for configuring security authorization, and adding users to roles

This was a major release because, after months of work, we had a whole bunch of functionality that was orchestrated for the Beta tossed over the wall a couple days before our user conference last month.
 
We're all pumped to have the final release out the door. For the next development iteration (3 weeks) our focus will be on ensuring compatibility with ArcGIS Server 9.3 (shipping in June) as well as ongoing JavaScript/REST API research and development.

FYI, today is Victoria Day in Canada. For most Canadians, Victoria Day is just a day off that enables the "May Long Weekend" but here in Victoria I guess somebody decided to try to make a bigger deal out of it (complete with parade and fireworks). So... if your emails haven't been answered so far today (i.e. if someone here forgot to set their out-of-office response), now you know why.

For Canada-only holidays I generally come into the office (along with two or three other people, and then we take a corresponding US holiday off). Someone needs to be here since the phone keeps ringing, but an otherwise quiet office means we can get lots of work done. Answering some incoming phone calls means I get to chat with a random selection of customers (most of whom I don't get a chance to speak with day-to-day). I've already had some wonderful conversations with folks that've called in. So, if you want to catch-up or share some ideas with me, this afternoon is the perfect time.

1. There is no definitive reference for WIX. Only an MSI reference on MSDN and a number of WIX tutorials scattered about the Web. If anyone wants to write "WIX For Dummies" or "WIX unleashed", I'm pretty sure they would make a killing. Without the book, allow a few days to read all you can about WIX and MSI.
2. Doing simple things can take an extraordinary amount of time to figure out how to do. Simple tasks such as manipulating combo boxes or enumerating SQL Servers are much more involved than you would imagine. I found that it helps if you forget everything you know about writing WinForms or Web applications and put your WIX thinking cap on from the beginning.
3. WIX has native support for editing settings files, installing Windows services and creating databases. If you find yourself writing code to perform these tasks, your approach is likely wrong.
4. Using the right tools can help you out tremendously. Editing dialog boxes using Notepad2 is not a lot of fun and very unproductive. I refused to go down that path and used the WixAware from the beginning. This was the right thing to do. InstallAware is currently in Beta and has a number of issues to work out but, it also has enough useful functionality in it to save a lot of time. I'm looking forward to their final release.

I'm sitting at Heathrow right now waiting for a connection after spending a week in the United Arab Emirates. I was at GISWORX (which is GISTEC's annual user conference). I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and was happy to have GISTEC programmers there when the Q&A session at the end of my presentation on our ArcGIS Server-generation solutions got into some in-depth technical questions.

I'm really impressed with the work people are doing in the region, and a few attendees have promised to send screenshots for my opening presentations of some cool projects (including an underwater inventory of coral reefs in Abu Dhabi--complete with video).