Streaming Video

About 2 years ago I stopped my Netflix subscription. One of the issues with DVD delivery is that the time between deciding you want to watch a movie and actually been able to start watching it is days.

We were not using the DVDs and it made more sense to just use the On Demand feature from Comcast when we want to watch movies.

That worked for the last few years but every time we want to watch a movie there is nothing that we would like to see.

I got a Xbox for my Xmas and noticed that it can stream Netflix movies. The benefit of Netflix with the convenience of streaming. Now, they only have about 10% of their inventory that is stream-able but that is good enough by now.

I have been watching a few movies today and I must say that I am REALLY impressed. Easy to use and for people that never know what we want to watch or when we can watch it it is looking like a good prospect.

More on this as I try it out more. So far so good!

Happy New Year

Well 2009 has rolled around quickly. Things are busy at work and at home so no consistent blogging which is a shame. I have a bunch of blog posts as drafts that I need to finish up and post so hopefully that will happen in the next few days.

Happy a healthy and prosperous 2009.

Finding out if a File Geodatabase Feature Class is compressed

Compressed file geodatabases (fGDB) are a great thing. They render data amazingly fast and search quickly but take up a miniscule amount of disk space. Good job to ESRI on getting it right.

They are not editable though, and therefore need to be removed from any candidate editable feature classes you may be looking at.

The following piece of code can be used to determine if the ftrClass is editable:

ICompressionInfo info = featureClass.FullName as ICompressionInfo;

if (info != null)

{

    if (info.IsCompressed == true)

        return true;

}

Infragistics AfterCellUpdate event and when it is triggered

Yet another Infragistics post. I have been battling a defect where the event for a cell being updated was not being triggered until the the use placed the focus on a different cell.

It turns out that I should not be using the AfterCellUpdate event but rather the CellChange event instead.

The former is raised when focus is lost the latter is triggered EVERY time it is changed. Since I am wanting to know when the embedded CheckBox is clicked I am fine with that.

ESRI AxToolbarControl and Windowless ActiveX controls are not supported

This is something that I encountered before but it cropped up again this morning and I thought it was time to get it on ‘paper’.

To allow for complete control of the application configuration, GO! Sync Mapbook uses reflection to load all of it’s components. This seems to cause a problem in Vista with machines that have Data Execution Prevention (DEP) running. The ActiveX controls that makeup ArcGIS Engine do not load properly.

There is a pretty good article here that shows how to turn it off completely.

I used the following command line to fix it:

bcdedit /set nx AlwaysOff

You need to run the command prompt as Administrator for it to work.

Infragistics first row in UltraWinGrid selected

The project that I am working on right now makes heavy use of Infragistics controls and in particular the UltraWinGrid. There has been a bug in the application for a while now that anytime the grid is refreshed the first row in the grid is also selected.

The weird thing is that in the code grid.Rows.Selected.Count == 0.

I have had other battles to fight so have left one alone. Until now.

It turns out that the row is not selected but is the active row.

There are two options, and I recommend doing both:

Set the ActiveRow appearance so that it does not look like it is selected. Instructions.

After setting a row as selected, make it the active row using grid.ActiveRow = row;

xsd command and multiple xsd files

I use the .net xsd command heavily but this is the first time that I have needed to generate a class when the xsd itself references other xsd files.

When I run the command as I normally use:

xsd /c <Name of the XSD file>

With multiple XSD imports though I get an error saying ‘Error: Error generating classes for schema’ due to it not being able find the externally referenced types.

The answer found here is to add the referenced xsd files to the end of the command like so:

xsd /c <Name of the XSD file> <Referenced file 1> <Referenced file 2> ..

This generates a file properly but it has a name created from the concatenation of all the xsd files involved:

<Name of the XSD file><Referenced file 1><Referenced file 2>.xsd

Simple rename of the file to something less verbose and all works fine.

Hide Selection using Infragistics

One of the most annoying things that I have seen from Infragistics, an otherwise brilliant company, is the fact that when any of their controls lose focus the selected item is not longer selected!

This has been so annoying for a long time for me and I have finally found the property on the control that stops it from happening.

The property name is HideSelection and by default is set to true. Setting this value to false makes the selected item in that control (implemented by all Infragistics controls I think) keep the item selected when it does not have focus.

Simple thing. Yes. Bugged me for months. Definitely.

ArcSDE And Active Directory

So I recently needed to connect into an ArcSDE database (direct connect) using the Operating System login and I realized that I had no idea how to do it.

Luckily, ESRI have a great EDN post about it which explains everything.

Essentially, you do not populate the IPropertySet with the USER and PASSWORD values but rather set the AUTHENTICATION_MODE to OSA.

The rest of the connection parameters are the same and since we normally use connection files in our applications it means that the connection file just needs to be changed.

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10 Years in Mobile GIS

Well there you have it. 10 years have gone by and I hardly even noticed it. I have been developing, consulting and a whole host of other tasks in the Mobile GIS world now for 10 years!

Back on January 5th 1998 when I joined Conic Systems Ltd. little did I know that I would be still in this industry.

Times have changed in the GIS industry over the past 10 years. I started developing in VB3 and C++ (can’t even remember what rev number!) using an in-house graphics/GIS engine which still to this day has some great ideas in it. It was the precursor to MapObjects and still has users.

Smallworld was dominant in the utility market at that time and the link between Smallworld and Conic took up the most of my time.

That was working life until, in very quick succession, Tadpole bought Conic and we moved from a proprietary engine to using ArcObjects. I never delved into Avenue programming and have only seen ArcView 3.x about 3 times in my whole life!

Now we are in an age of server based GIS with mobile devices syncing when they can.

I happened upon the GIS industry and am glad that I did.

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