Webinar: Migrating Custom ArcMap Tools to ArcGIS Pro
On Tuesday, April 15th, 2025 we hosted a Railroad GIS Community live webinar that covered one of the several topics related to evolving your use of desktop GIS from the ArcMap workstation to the ArcGIS Pro workstation.
Specifically, we discussed the topic of how to migrate any custom tools you may have built for ArcMap using the ArcObjects SDK, and migrate those to ArcGIS Pro and the newer, more capable applications throughout the modern ArcGIS system.
If you were not able to attend the webinar, or would like to refer to it again, we recorded it, and have made it available at this link here (link to follow soon).
Here's a quick snapshot of the topics that we covered:
The presenters of the webinar were:
Erik Henderson, Manager of Esri's Railroad Solutions Practice
Jim Barry, Senior Solution Engineer, Railroads
Vedant Bajaj, Product Manager for the ArcGIS Pro SDK
VIDEO AND SLIDES
If you weren't able to attend, or if you did, but want to review the presentation again:
Here is a link to the video recording
...and...
Here is a link to the slide deck we used during the presentation. It contains lots of links to other resources.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
We only had one question at the end:
Does ArcGIS Pro support all of the same data formats as ArcMap did?
Answer:
Almost completely, yes. Actually, ArcGIS Pro supports several more data formats, both vector, raster, and others, than ArcMap did.
And while ArcGIS Pro continues to fully support the Shapefile format, we don't really recommend it, because of its many limitations, for example, shapefiles do not support null values in numeric columns, column names cannot be more than 10 characters long, it has limited codepage support, limited data type support, it does not support domains or topology. I could go on and on, but those there are enough reason to avoid using them.
Not to mention, not all functions within ArcGIS Pro support the use of Shapefiles, and are really designed with geodatabases in mind.
That said, there is one format that was very popularly used with ArcMap that is no longer supported with ArcGIS Pro, and that is the Personal Geodatabase format, which is based on Microsoft Access. It would be better if you converted those into the File Geodatabase format if you want to store your data on your file system, or the SQLite-based Mobile Geodatabase format, or into the Enterprise Geodatabase format, if you want to store your data in a relational database management system like Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, etc.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Erik Henderson then provided a run-down of our upcoming Railroad GIS Community activities, both in person and online.
