ArcGIS Runtime or ArcGIS Engine

SreejaS

Hello,

My subject for discussion may look quite simple, but I am confused. I am back to ESRI development after a while and I see an ocean to new stuff!. Currently I am reading through the new stuff, first through desktop based customisation or applications. I have found there are multiple ways of achieving a functionality in desktop from version 10 onwards compared to previous version. I have a question though - how to decide between ArcGIS Engine and ArcGIS Runtime? Both looks like suitable for creating stand alone application. What is the criteria to prefer each of these?

Thanks and Regards

Sreeja S.

JustinShepard

There are lots of factors that could contribute and a lot of it depends on the experience and coding preferences. I admit that I haven't done much with Engine, but from my understanding Engine has more supported functionality but Runtime is more easily combined with a wider range of technologies/languages.

When deciding to use the .NET Runtime or not I found this very useful, Supported geoprocessing tools—ArcGIS Runtime SDK for .NET | ArcGIS for Developers (the link is just for .NET Desktop Runtime but I assume they have a similar list for other Runtimes) since geoprocessing is supported with Runtime... but NOT all geoprocessing.

The other thing to consider is esri's apparent direction of growing the Runtime engines so I tend towards using Runtime if what I need to do with it is supported. However, there have been instances that what I wanted to do is not supported and I've had to come up with alternative solutions.