Last Sunday (March 9) Esri announced the public beta release of their mapping SDK for .NET. This new SDK covers Windows Store, Windows Phone, and WPF. Can you believe it? All three platforms, and all using the same API. This is huge news if you develop mapping applications. Personally I find it painful that in Windows Phone 7 you would use the Bing Maps (Silverlight) SDK. In Windows Phone 8 you were encouraged to use the new Nokia Maps SDK, while on Windows Store you had the Bing Maps SDK, but it was a different SDK than the Windows Phone 7 one. So that’s three different SDKs to use. I have no idea who thought this was a sane idea.
Esri has been working hard on this new SDK. During the Devsummit last year (2014), Esri announced the beta of a new SDK that would target Windows Store. At that time, they already had a Windows Phone SDK and a WPF SDK. Both were very similar with a few extras on the WPF side. While working on this new beta for Windows Store, they decided it would be much better to have a new SDK that targeted Phone, Store, and WPF. So for the past year that’s what they have been doing.
Over the coming weeks I’ll be blogging about how you can create mapping apps that use this new SDK. Some of these blogs will have a heavy focus on the GIS person, while others will be targeted to everyday app builders who want a better experience building map apps. These blogs will focus on Windows Store, but can be applied to Windows Phone and WPF as well.
Part 1: Building a map app with the ArcGIS Runtime Map
Part 2: Working with Basic Mapping Layers in the ArcGIS Runtime Map
Part 3: Working with the MapView control in the ArcGIS Runtime
Park 4: Working with location in an ArcGIS Runtime Map app
Part 5: Adding map pins (graphics) to the ArcGIS Runtime Map
Part 6: Customizing map pins (graphics) in the ArcGIS Runtime Map
…
Part x: Working with the “GIS User” Layers in the ArcGIS Runtime
… More to come.