Book Image

Learning ArcGIS Runtime SDK for .NET

By : Ron Vincent
Book Image

Learning ArcGIS Runtime SDK for .NET

By: Ron Vincent

Overview of this book

ArcGIS is a geographic information system (GIS) that enables you to work with maps and geographic information. It can be used to create and utilize maps, compile geographic data, analyze mapped information, share and discover geographic information and manage geographic information in a database. This book starts by showing you where ArcGIS Runtime fits within Esri’s overall platform strategy. You'll create an initial map using the SDK, then use it to get an understanding of the MVVM model. You'll find out about the different kinds of layers and start adding layers, and you'll learn to transform maps into a 3D scene. The next chapters will help you comprehend and extract information contained in the maps using co-ordinates and layer objects. Towards the end, you will learn to set the symbology, decide whether to use 2D or 3D, see how to implement 2D or 3D, and learn to search and find objects. You'll also get to grips with many other standard features of the Application Programming Interface (API), including create applications and finally testing, licensing, and deploying them. Once completed, you will be able to meet most of the common requirements of any mapping application for desktop or mobile platforms.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning ArcGIS Runtime SDK for .NET
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
3
Maps and Layers
12
Configuring, Licensing, and Deploying
Index

Why the .NET version of ArcGIS Runtime?


You may be wondering why this book is focused on the .NET version of ArcGIS Runtime. Well, for starters, many Esri users like .NET, especially C#. Another reason is that if you know Java and Android, you'll find it easy enough to read the C# code because Java and C# are similar. Another important reason is that Esri has released 3D first in the .NET SDK, so it was hard to pass up this opportunity to talk about one of my favorite subjects (3D). ArcGIS Pro will also be based on .NET, so hopefully some of the skills you learn about here, especially Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM), will also apply to Pro. Furthermore, there seems to be a general sense that Visual Studio is a great Integrated Development Environment (IDE), as opposed to Eclipse, NetBeans, Google's Android Studio, and the other IDEs, but that's just my opinion. This is not anything against those IDEs, I just prefer Visual Studio. Very soon Esri is going to release the Xamarin® support, which means that the developers will be able to write an app in Visual Studio, compile it natively, and run it on Windows, Windows Store, iOS, and Android. I suspect you'll agree with some of these and disagree with others. Regardless, I hope that by the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of the API so that you can move to any other SDKs, and it will be just a matter of switching your brain from C# to Android or to C++ or to Java.