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

[Daniel Ames]

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 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
geology.isu.edu
www.mapwindow.org

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