Bill Dollins is talking about how SharpMap is giving him back his “old MO vibe again”. What caught me eye was:
The open source nature of SharpMap was a huge plus and I’m having fun doing things that I always wanted to do in MO.
I can’t think of another ESRI “product” that has generated more love than MapObjects. It is too bad that MapObjects was cast aside for ArcObjects and ArcGIS Engine (both fine products, but overkill for many applications).
SharpMap includes ASP.NET 2.0 and Winforms 2.0 controls. It features rendering objects that are distinct from the UI on which they are rendering. It’s a model that allows for great flexibility.
Sounds like a slam dunk to me. WPF is the direction that .NET developers are heading so WPF support in SharpMap could open up a whole new area for desktop GIS.
So if you’ve been looking to get your MO on again, SharpMap obviously deserves a look.
11 responses so far ↓
1
Andrew Theken
// Aug 14, 2007 at 1:13 pm
SharpMap is awesome.
I’ve had success taking shapefiles and dynamically overlaying them onto google maps, so there’s a huge amount of flexibility.
Along with SharpMap, I suggest NetTopologySuite which provides a .Net library for some geoprocessing. (I have some affiliation with NTS).
I believe that Morten Neilsen, the original author of the SharpMap library, now works at ESRI. I am not sure if the library got him the job, but I am sure being the author of such a nice set of code didn’t hurt his chances there.
2
Ben Slater
// Aug 14, 2007 at 1:58 pm
I suspect projects like SharpMap are one of the reasons why ESRI dropped MapObjects. There’s simply no reason to shell out $1000 for a light weight set of mapping tools today when there are several solid free choices out there.
3
Bill
// Aug 14, 2007 at 2:01 pm
@Andrew
You are correct about Morten. You sure don’t need a resume when you’ve got code like that. I think he’s leading the SharpGPS project as well, but I could be wrong about that.
I think SharpMap also uses NTS. It is a nice library.
@James
Agree 100%. I’ve done a lot of work with them and they’ve served me well but I think ESRI would be well-served to offer up a lighter-weight toolset that easier to deploy at runtime along side their current product line.
4
Bill Thorp
// Aug 14, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I’m using SharpMap on my current project. I’m doing pretty simple stuff with it (extracting data from shapefiles), but I have to say its a pleasure to use.
5
Lefty
// Aug 14, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I’m wondering if Morton made the wrong decision. SharpMap looks very impressive, the WebADF is nothing like this.
6
Grinder
// Aug 14, 2007 at 3:01 pm
I also agree with others that it would serve ESRI well to offer up a lighter weight toolset. I would love to deploy a WPF application using ESRI MapObjects.NET, but the current runtime deployment and cost is prohibitive for semi-commercial product.
SharpMap is a tremendous library that simply lacks an active community. e-mails and discussion forum posts remain unanswered and it is simply difficult to communicate with the team. Oh the perils of Open Source.
7 University Update - Open Source - SharpMap is the new MapObjects? // Aug 14, 2007 at 3:20 pm
[...] Contact the Webmaster Link to Article open source SharpMap is the new MapObjects? » Posted at James Fee GIS Blog — [...]
8
srweal
// Aug 14, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Hey, I’m using SharpMap and the forums aren’t as quiet as some people suggest. I’ve had good responses and been able to troubleshoot any bugs fairly quickly. The developers are also quite active, but seem to be working on two different versions of SharpMap.
SharpMap is perfect for my needs, as a simple mapping engine and it ties in nicely with NTS to allow more advanced geometry operations. It’s well worth a look. Also allows reading/writing from spatial DBs and a range of formats.
Once of the other great points is that it can run without loading any software on the server, meaning you can just dump the DLLs in the /bin directory and away you go. Certainly a useful feature if using commercial hosting environments.
9
Bill
// Aug 14, 2007 at 5:12 pm
I’d have to agree with that. There are a few active developers, not including the contributors. Most of the forum posts have recent responses. For an independent project with no apparent corporate backing, it seems fairly active.
10
Diego Guidi
// Aug 15, 2007 at 2:10 am
I think that the lacks of responses in the forums that someone talks is due mainly because now the developers are at work for the v 2.0, that looks very cool… the main problem in .NET opensource is that we need help from developers out there…
NetTopologySuite development is stopped at v1.7.2, but JTS team plans to release v1.9.0 really soon, with a lot of new cool features like PreparedGeometry support (http://tinyurl.com/ys7egk) that .NET world needs to use…
11
thomas
// Jan 3, 2008 at 1:32 pm
can someone point me to a good direction for i just cannot even open the source due to missisng md5 data for sharpgps. i did not try to open sharpmap yet. i did a lot of mapobjects work in the past and i want to play the sharpmap to brush up my c# skill.
by the way, if anyone want to buy some cheap electronic gadgets, please visit my website at http://www.byshipping.com.
thank you and best regards
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