What did you like best about the 2013 Dev Summit?

[LeoDonahue]

For those of you that attended the Developer Summit, can you give some insight about what you learned/heard to the rest of us?

[RichardWatson]

Most useful sessions:

ArcGIS: The Road Ahead
Road Ahead for ArcGIS Runtime SDKs

Most entertaining sessions:

Jared M. Spool: Anatomy of a Design Decision
Son of Killer Apps: Baby Steps to Innovation

My overall assessment was that the conference was largely a rehash of 10.1 with some bits of 10.2 and a little of 11.0 at the end.

[LeoDonahue]

I'll be sure to check those out when they are available online.

[RichardWatson]

The focus seems to be on the ArcGIS Runtime which provides device specific solutions.  Disconnected editing is only supporting using the ArcGIS Runtime which is based on replicating features to SQLite.

If you do not need disconnected editing then the web solutions may work for you (Flex, Silverlight, JavaScipt).  The obvious advantage of these solutions is that they run on multiple devices.  Both Flex and Silverlight are mature offerings and almost all the web sessions focused on JavaScript which is rapidly evolving.  One thing that was obvious is how much JavaScript relies on open source projects and there certainly were a number of these being discussed.  It was also obvious that JavaScript is rapidly evolving with AMD, ECMA6, HTML5, CSS3, etc.

One of the demos showed offline editing.  The speaker went through all the things that they had installed in order to work offline.  It was something like 1 Gb for this, 1 Gb for that, etc.  Lots of gigs were required.  Seemed to me like this was pushing the current edge of mobile technology but clearly this is rapidly changing.

[RichardWatson]

One of the features in 10.2 was Portal becomes a product.  In the licensing session they said that portal has the same pricing model as online (AGOL).  I believe that they both use a named user licensing model.

ESRI is also trying to provide integrated security across the platform.  Lots of buzz words here like PKI, SAML2, OAUTH2, SSO, etc.

[LeoDonahue]

The ArcGIS Rutimes are competing with regular ArcObjects for the Desktop?  What is the idea behind that?

[RichardWatson]

I'll be sure to check those out when they are available online.

ESRI said that they were not going to post the Road Ahead sessions.

ArcGIS Desktop for Professionals (v11)
- brand new software
- integrated with online
- x64
- fast 3d/2d graphics engine; integrated
- single multi-threaded application; a fusion of map/catalog/globe/scene
- simple contextual UI (think Office 2013)
- project centric workflows
- simple search and query
- simple data management
- map layouts enhanced
- powerful analytics
- help system
- integrated with ESRI solutions
- simple extension models and developer APIs include Python and .NET
- linked views
- multiple views
- host testing this year
- not built on ArcGIS Runtime but shares code/features

[RichardWatson]

The ArcGIS Rutimes are competing with regular ArcObjects for the Desktop?  What is the idea behind that?

Yes, in the same way that Engine competed with ArcMap.

The ArcGIS Runtime covers a very small subset of ArcMap.

[LeoDonahue]

ESRI said that they were not going to post the Road Ahead sessions.

I noticed.  I'll bet the Son of Killer Apps was better in person.

[StefanOffermann]

ArcGIS Desktop for Professionals (v11)

This sounds like Esri is finally kicking out COM and ArcObjects will not be available after version 10.*. Is there any published link to it yet? If this comes true, I should definetly have a look at it 🙂