Preface

Welcome to the exciting world of building native, cross-platform mapping apps! For many kinds of app, a map is not only a nice feature, it's a must. With this book, you're going to explore ArcGIS Runtime, which is a Software Developer Kit (SDK) from Esri, the world's largest provider of Geographic Information System software. With this SDK, you're going to be taken on a journey from the basics up to an intermediate level of understanding how to build a complete, professional application by learning the ArcGIS Runtime SDK and Application Programming Interface (API). With ArcGIS Runtime, you can build native, cross-platform mapping apps that can include the ability to display data in 2D and 3D from online or offline data sources, edit online and offline data, online and offline geocoding and routing, conduct spatial analysis, navigation, and so on. What's more is that ArcGIS Runtime comes in several languages, such as .NET (C# and Visual Basic), Java SE, Objective-C, and C++. As a result, you can build highly performant apps and run them natively on Windows, iOS, OS X, Android, and Linux.

With the API, you can build interactive, beautiful maps that you can then sell on the App Store, or make available to users in your organization as part of an Enterprise Mobility strategy, or even embed a map into another app such as a military system. Your users will then be able to access a rich set of content from the cloud (ArcGIS Online or Portal for ArcGIS) or in disconnected mode using offline data that you or your organization has created. As you gain more familiarity with the API, you'll find that it's much easier than previous technologies from Esri and offers new possibilities such as augmented reality, real-time mapping, virtual reality, disconnected analytics, and a whole host of other possibilities.

Although Esri's help for ArcGIS Runtime is great, you'll find that this book offers more. In fact, this book will provide you step-by-step instructions in C# for building an app. Not only that, it shows you how to structure your app using the Model-View-ViewModel pattern, a popular pattern for .NET developers. You will, along the way, learn about 3D mapping and spatial analysis and even how to test your apps using test-driven development and take a deep dive into performance testing. By the time you're done reading this book, you will have all the necessary skills to build an app from beginning to deployment on the selected devices, no matter if it's a laptop, tablet, or smart phone. The reason for this is that the API is nearly identical across all platforms. As a result, what you learn in this book, except for differences in the languages, will for the most part apply to other flavors of ArcGIS Runtime. Learn the API once, and then apply across multiple platforms.