[DotNet-OSGeo] More introductions and a joint development proposal...

[Michael P. Gerlek]

I'm late getting back to the party, but...

* How does MapWindow v6 do its graphics - WPF, Forms, GDI, DirectX, ..?

* I'm totally in favor of filling out a Spatial namespace.  Not sure if it is PC to hijack the System top level namespace, but that aside I'd love to see something like this come together.  Especially if we can keep things safe for Mono folks too.  What can I do to help?   GDAL and liblas both have .NET bindings, so those could be used for raster and LAS support.

* "OSGeo.NET" has a nice ring to it :-)

* Do we have a listing of .NET geo projects somewhere?  I started a page (http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/DotNetProjects) once upon a time, but it is likely very out of date now.

-mpg

From: dotnet-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:dotnet-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Ames
Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 11:49 PM
To: dotnet at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [DotNet-OSGeo] More introductions and a joint development proposal...

Thanks to all of you who have joined this list in the last couple of days since we created it. Very cool to see that there is indeed interest in .NET open source! (Of course we all knew it...).

OK, so by way of introductions, I've been the project leader of the MapWindow project for the past several years (http://www.MapWindow.org) which is a C++ ActiveX control wrapped by a VB.NET<http://VB.NET> desktop application that hosts plugins - mostly written in C#. Of course it's all open source from the ground up. Our desktop app is probably the most popular tool in our arsenal with about 6,000 downloads per month.

Our latest effort has been to create a fully C# version of everything for reasons that I'm sure you all would understand (such as getting away from ActiveX/COM "DLL Hell"...) That project is here: http://mapwindow6.codeplex.com

As we've been working on this here in my lab in Idaho, it struck several of us that we should start working as a broader OSGeo .NET group on constructing a core set of libraries that fit snugly into the .NET Framework. The goal here would be to build on a common namespace in such a way that we result in tools that all live and work nicely together.

So here is my proposal... we would like to participate in a group effort to develop a set of .NET based GIS related libraries under the "System.Spatial" namespace. This could include things such as "System.Spatial.Projections" "System.Spatial.Data" etc. All of these would be compatible libraries that - together - give programmers a complete set of tools for building GIS enabled software. We would just need all of the interested parties who are working on separate tools, to contribute their tools - retooled under the new namespace...

Who knows... if we do it right, maybe Microsoft would go so far as to give it a stamp of approval and link to it from their .NET developer sites...

In any case, please give this idea some thought... We have started a placeholder CodePlex project for this effort at http://dotspatial.codeplex.com and have made the first contribution which is a full port of PROJ4 to a C# DLL called System.Spatial.Projections.dll. We've also started listing ideas on what the various sub-namespaces could be (on that codeplex site  home page).

Any feedback or thoughts on this idea would be much appreciated!  Also, anyone have any ideas on what a good "dotSpatial" logo might look like? and how could/should we get various developers of various low-level C# DLLs to contribute?

Dan

--
Daniel P. Ames, Ph.D. PE
Associate Professor, Geosciences
Idaho State University - Idaho Falls
amesdani at isu.edu<mailto:amesdani at isu.edu>
geology.isu.edu<http://geology.isu.edu>
www.mapwindow.org<http://www.mapwindow.org>

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