[mapguide-users] Silverlight/Moonlight Viewer

[Kenneth Skovhede, GEOGRAF A/S]

I have made a small step towards a Silverlight "viewer": A managed 
render, with a MapGuide provider:
http://code.google.com/p/littlesharprenderengine/

If you run the project, it can render features from MapGuide, eg. the 
Sheboygan dataset.
There are a lot of loose ends, such as scaleranges, labels, filters, 
symbols, coordinatesystems, etc.

After the initial load, all features are stored in memory, so the speed 
you experience is a full rendering
of all features from all layers, with no filters of any kind (read: no 
optimizations at all).

Instead of building a full fledged Silverlight viewer, I want to build a 
Silverlight powered layer,
that can act as an OpenLayers layer. That way all the Fusion stuff still 
works, and so does
any custom application based on OpenLayers.

With such a layer, you get all the bells and whistles from OpenLayers, 
and the speed of
a client based vector render. IMO, the best of both worlds.

If you like, you can also make the edit tools from OL as Silverlight, 
and "hack" them on.

Let me know what you think.

Regards, Kenneth Skovhede, GEOGRAF A/S



Carl Jokl skrev:
> There have been some potential improvements in the performance of the AJAX
> viewer in MapGuide 2010. One issue that has been a problem though as I have
> heared reported from others in the company is the matter of image
> compression. This hits performance on both the AJAX and DWF viewer simply
> because the images being sent across the internet are larger than in
> MapGuide 6.5. I have not been personally involved in investigating this so
> don't have all the details. I was just curious given that this thread
> suggested that someone might try and work on a replacement for the DWF
> viewer in Silverlight. If nothing has come of that then that answers the
> question. In reference to the last post, in terms of performance I had in
> mind a viewer which wasn't using image tiles at all rather was rendering the
> DWF on the client directly as the ActiveX plugin does. This would be a big
> undertaking as essentially you would need a component to parse DWF and
> another to graphically render it. Finally you would need to add the MapGuide
> control to this component to handle things like the menus and exposing the
> client API. 
>
> If a Silverlight viewer were used that just used the Image Tiles like the
> AJAX viewer then I suspect the performance might not be so much different.
> If the key performance issue is bandwidth and time taken to transmit image
> tiles across the internet that will be an issue regardless of the client
> side technology rendering those tiles.
>
> I might fear also that if the DWF view is not going to be supported anymore
> there might also be a case for pulling the plug on supporting transmitting
> the map image data from the server in DWF form too. If that becomes the case
> a new viewer replacement viewer to take the place of the ActiveX control
> becomes useless.  
>
>