2010 Census TIGER/Line Shapefiles

I know everyone is as excited as I am the the first round of TIGER data from the 2010 census starts being released in December 2010 to February 2011.

For the complete schedule: check out this.

Enjoy

Working with Special Characters

Every once in awhile you need to work with the following characters in XAML:

• >
• <
• "
• &

You would get these errors if you put them in a text value:
Error 5 Entity references or sequences beginning with an ampersand ‘&’ must be terminated with a semicolon ‘;’.
Error 4 ‘"’ is an unexpected token. The expected token is ‘;’.

You can encode invalid characters for use in XAML by using the following encoding syntax:

Character	Encoding
<	&lt;
>	&gt;
&	&amp;
“	&quot;
space	&#160;
‘	&apos;
(numeric character mappings)	&#[integer]; or &#x[hex];
(nonbreaking space)	&#160; (assuming UTF-8 encoding)

Social Networking Map

This is from: http://www.flowtown.com/blog/the-2010-social-networking-map?display=wide

Creating Private Methods in Python

Python, as you may or may not know, is a fully object oriented language and with the newly created ArcPy module for ESRI's ArcGIS Suite, users should start creating programs following some sort of OO design. 
One design pattern to follow is the singleton pattern, which can be found here. 

Once you have started diving into the world of classes, name spaces, and methods, it's time to figure out how to make methods private.  It's surprisingly simple to do this.  To make something private in python, just put two underscores in front of your method.  That's it, now only that class can access that method. 

Here is a small example:

This class contains two functions.  One that will make the self.foo text upper case, and the other lower case.  The capital method has the two __ in front of the method, and should not be seen by the user, and lower() has no underscores that therefore is public. Using the idle's we can easily show that __capital cannot be used publicly by a user:

Enjoy
A

Developer Cheat Sheets

Tired of googling for answers, check out this site: http://devcheatsheet.com/

It has all kinds of programming reference sheets which are good for quick look ups about various concepts.

Enjoy

PyDev and Installing New Libraries/Modules

If you use PyDev to create python scripts, and you add new libraries to your development system, you will need to update the interpreter.

To do this do the following:
1) Click on Project -> Properties
2) Select PyDev - Interpreter/ Grammar
3) Under the interpreter combo box, click on the text that says: "Click here to configure an interpreter not listed."
4) Press Apply -> It will take a couple of minutes to look through your PythonPaths -> Press Ok
5) Begin Coding

Enjoy

MVVM for Silverlight

MV-VM is a design pattern for Silverlight and WPF.  I have recently ventured into this domain, and I found a good resource to reference:
http://viewmodelsupport.codeplex.com/
Check it out and Post you own links in the comments to help other with MVVM design patterns!

Enjoy