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<P class=ecxMsoNormal><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; COLOR: #1f497d; FONT-SIZE: 11pt"><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Tahoma>Michael wrote</FONT></SPAN></P>
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<P class=ecxMsoNormal><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; COLOR: #1f497d; FONT-SIZE: 11pt">There are packages that will do Shapefiles for you, know you?</SPAN></P>
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<P class=ecxMsoNormal><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; COLOR: #1f497d; FONT-SIZE: 11pt">-mpg</SPAN></P>
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<BR>Yes. I'll eventually get to the libraries. But there are some considerations. I've always been or atleast felt alone in my coding quest. Noone tought me anything (that's not true). The net.framework is HUGE from a newbie point of view .. how do I know that it doesn't already contain what I need (as it did with the tif-encoder) without learning about the nooks and crannies of it - and that's an enormous task on it's own. Around easter I had a look at the libraries of two of the dotnet-projects. I was pleasently surprised. But I shyed away becourse of the overhead. My first exe-files turned out to be executable from my web-pages. It was and they still are so small and selfcontained, that they for 'some' practical reasons can function as a 'format': The little D2-polyLine editor contains the line-data and a continous abillity to edit it .. woila! It's an exe with no consequences, but it complies to a sound design-rule: keep it simple! It does no more and no less than it promises.<BR>
There is a particular reason to do the 'copying' of classes that I do: I need to get to know the gis-world (I'm a geologist), and the laborious task of dealing practically with the details IS the learning-process. I get the classes too, fine.<BR>
One of the reasons that I keep coding is the posibillity to .. over time .. build a library of 'good' classes. A library that I KNOW inside out. This sounds good, but the reallity is different. So few things survive time. Sometimes, after writing a class, I feel that I can tell if it's going to be usefull in the future .. and it's again the 'I can see what it does', and it does no more and no less. I spent most of my time trying to understand .. life is too short for cryptic classes. In this respect the dotnet libraries I looked at gets an A+. <BR>
If there are small dll's that deals with the basic formats it would be stupid not to use them, but the shortcut may only be exploitable in the vb-editor becourse of the intelli-sense (I don't know where the intelli-sense went in my current C#-editor)<BR>
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Carsten<BR>
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