Important Links to Bookmark for Geoprocessing Tool Development

Here are some important links that I think any developer should have in there back pocket, if they are going to use, publish, or create GP tools.

This is about Feature and Record sets.

This is about the input and output types that are supported when publishing services.

Serialize Anything!

When you start with threading, especially in AGX 900 sdk, you are going to need to translate your objects into strings. To do this, just use the two functions below.



private byte[] getByteArrayWithObject( Object o )
{
/*

1) Create a new MemoryStream class with the CanWrite property set to true
(should be by default, using the default constructor).

2) Create a new instance of the BinaryFormatter class.

3) Pass the MemoryStream instance and your object to be serialized to the
Serialize method of the BinaryFormatter class.

4) Call the ToArray method on the MemoryStream class to get a byte array
with the serialized data.

*/


MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
BinaryFormatter bf1 = new BinaryFormatter();
bf1.Serialize( ms, o );
return ms.ToArray();
}
private object getObjectWithByteArray( byte[] theByteArray )
{
MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream( theByteArray );
BinaryFormatter bf1 = new BinaryFormatter();
ms.Position = 0;

return bf1.Deserialize( ms );
}



You can then translate your byte[] into a string using the built in Convert with .Net. Now you have values passed into the AGX BackGroundThread.

Enjoy

AGX 900 is released

ESRI has released AGX 900 with new ribbon technology. I am quite excited about this release except for one issue, which I'll get to later.

The AGX 900 SDK has been revamped. It is shiny and new, and now uses a flavor of background workers instead of the task and taskui classes. The use of background workers makes programming tasks very easy compared to the old way. Now here is the rub, though I love this product, it lack the capabilities to use published Geoprocessing tasks out of the box.

During beta testing of this product, I did not see many comments on if this point. I'm interested to see if AGX 900 will have an expansion pack to perform this.