ArcGIS Explorer Build 380: Fresh Out of the Oven!

ArcGIS Explorer greeted me this afternoon with the notice that a new version was available for download! It's incredibly encouraging to see this sort of off-cycle upgrade — ESRI seems to be taking this newfangled continuous delivery model relatively seriously. Some commentators have suggested that AGX was kicked out of the door too early so that the real cash cow — ArcGIS 9.2 — could be finished. Hey, if I owned ESRI I'd do the same thing. Now 9.2's out the door, they're busy with service packs for it, and releasing new builds of AGX with decent new functionality. ESRI did indeed promise at the 2007 Developer Summit that they'd be releasing incremental functionality in service packs and not just waiting until the next big version. Way to go!

Installation

AGX wants to uninstall old versions of itself and install the latest build clean. Seems sensible. I don't yet have any interesting customizations, so I can't tell you if it keeps your old settings. The uninstall and install went completely smoothly

Pretty Colors!

The default imagery is much prettier. This matters — who doesn't like shiny things?! They got rid of the placeholder clouds layer altogether and just have the earth with a pretty simulated horizon haze like WorldWind does. I'm sure you can add real-time clouds to your heart's content.

The labeling is still pretty lousy. The default transportation layer is still rasterized vectors and they're not very aggressive about matching screen resolution with downloaded resolution on these layers. Check out the I-10 label near where I live in the Heights.

WMS

I've been on a WMS kick recently, using it as a lingua franca between AGX, ArcMap, Google Earth and some other clients. So news that build 380 finally allows users to specify which sub-layers they want to load onto their globe is extremely welcome. Most public WMS servers are not really "map services" so much as "map catalog services" — they can have over 100 layers which need to be manually selected and take minutes to render if you turn on too many layers.

The good news is that AGX 380 is a much better WMS client than AGX 350. 350 notoriously retrieved every tile twice, in the wrong order, and on one thread. 380 stops the multiple-retrieval problem cold, thank goodness. Each tile is retrieved only once. I'm happy to take this win as it means an instant 2x speedup of WMS services. The tiles still come in a bad order, and all on one thread, so there's plenty to keep the programmers busy. For comparison, visual inspection suggests Google Earth keeps 2-6 threads busy downloading their tiles, and it makes a marked difference. (Speculation: the hard part is not the multithreaded asynchronous tile retrieval, but either (1) the cooperative maintenance of the in-memory data structures which drive the cache and globe or (2) pure evil of the COM threading apartment variety thanks to legacy code or (3) the single-threadedness of GDAL.)

380 now uses WinINET (aka IE) proxy settings, which makes it easier to use Fiddler to discover such things and probably much easier for users to start playing with AGX. If IE works, AGX is going to work.

SDK: Pretty Smooth

You'll need to download a new version of the SDK to take advantage of some of the new features. It does the same uninstall/reinstall dance, which is much slower. My trivial samples are recompiling and executing cleanly under the new SDK. I'm not doing anything terribly sophisticated at the moment (adding layers to the globe), so take that for what it's worth.

All in all, nothing earth shattering, but good solid updates on several fronts.