geographika

Most of the major GIS software vendors now have a free introductory “viewer” available for download. These normally contain standard navigation and selection tools, and allow you to view datasets but not change them.

They are very useful if a company is about to invest in a GIS and are unsure what software to use. Point their employees to the following links, create a few datasets relevant to their organisation, and let them get a feel for each and find out their preferences. Clearly it will be the management who will make the investment so there will be a trade-off between cost and how much their employees like a particular product.

Of course you could always just recommend whichever one you feel most comfortable developing in..

“GeoMedia Viewer is an easy to use, FREE GIS software application for desktop viewing and distribution of geospatial data”

https://support.intergraph.com/Product/GeoMediaViewer.asp
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I recently learned from James Fee’s blog that ArcGIS 9.4 will be the last version that supports VBA. I can see why this is being dropped – Microsoft no longer promotes or updates VBA. Microsoft now promote “Visual Studio Tools for Office” as its replacement for VBA in MS Office products, however VBA is still in Office 2007, and looks to be kept in for at least the next version. Is ESRI acting too prematurely? I can think of 7 good reasons why VBA should be kept.

1. VBA is great for prototyping. There is no need to open up Visual Studio, create a custom tool, implement all its interfaces and constructors etc. before you can even get round to writing the code for the OnClick event of a button.
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I’ve recently completed my first custom tool for CadCorp’s Map Modeller. CadCorp is most used in the UK, and it is apparently also big in Japan. The main benefit is that it reads many different spatial data formats directly, it can connect to SQL Server and Oracle without middleware (i.e. an SDE type application), and it is a leader in the open standards espoused by the Open Geospatial Consortium.

In terms of development the main issue is that there appear to be very few people developing tools around CadCorp’s products apart from CadCorp themselves. This means that the only code samples are in the help system installed with the tool, and a PDF file. Straying outside these samples I found involves a lot of trial and error. There is a forum on the CadCorp site – annoyingly registration is required to read the posts, and there are very few programming related posts. The CadCorp staff do however get back to you on any questions you pose.

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I use Visio for a number of tasks. For creating geodatabase models in ArcGIS, for system architecture diagrams, and for data flow models. It may not be the easiest program to use, but the alternatives are often too simplistic, or worse.

I wanted to generate a nice diagram of a SQL Server database I had created, and automatically create hyperlinks that would pop up an Ajax box with sample records directly from the database. In order to do this each hyperlink had to have a variable based on the table/entity name. However it soon became apparent that there is no easy way to access the entity name in VBA from its associated shape object. The solution to this is the VisioModelingEngine library which provides access to the UML, but does not provide access to the shapes.
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