Much like Chris over at GeoScrum, I've been carefully listening for Agile-speak here at the developer summit because I'm keenly interested in what the rest of the industry is going in their development pathways at the same time our team is adopting Scrum and looking for opportunities to exercise our skills.  On Monday night, I had some good informal conversations around the water cooler (read: "beer cooler") with other developers while we enjoyed the welcome festivities. While standing with Chris and Dave, a couple of questions on a common theme arose:

How, as consultants, do you folks keep the lights on as an agile shop if you don't do fixed fee, fixed deliverable contracts?

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Spending some time this evening making some notes and preparing my thoughts for a podcast that Brady and I will be giving tomorrow.  We're going to be speaking with the ESRI folks about some of the work we've been doing with their technology.  At this point, we're planning on highlighting a couple of the more interesting projects we've been working on (Mobile ADF, Engine, Server) and also pointing to our plans for integration and interoperability of ESRI and other mapping technologies (VE, etc.).  Hopefully we'll have the opportunity for me to spout off about Agile for awhile and discuss some of the coming trends in the web realm, etc.  The podcast recording is scheduled for 4:30 tomorrow and I'm still not sure at this point whether this will wind up in the ESRI site, our corporate site, or both.  Anyhow, I'll post the link once I figure out where it'll be.

Excellent first day at the ESRI Dev Summit.  The big story from my persepective was a pair of sessions summarizing the REST and JavaScript APIs being released at 9.3.  Dave has already provided a pretty good summary of the plenary, REST, and JavaScript API stuff over here so I won't reiterate or reinvent the wheel. Suffice it to say that I echo the comments of others in that I'm impressed with this latest stuff from the dev team. DOJO based, Web 2.0, HTTP Goodness...it's all there. While I didn't make the dev summit last year, I can say that this year's message in terms of interoperability and integration so far has been entirely different from what I heard at the first conference. The first year that ESRI held this event I asked a lot of questions about OGC and interoperability and got some pretty non-commital answers. This year at the summit I've been here a day and we've had all sorts of mashups (VE, Google, Yahoo Pipes, etc.) as well as a demo viewing Image Server in a bona fide OGC client from Carbon Tools. This combination of ESRI technology with other vendors and standards within the Web 2.0 paradigm is frankly pretty exciting. Other good news...there is no charge for using the REST or JavaScript APIs.  You do of course need an ArcGIS Server instance to leverage the REST stuff and to have a base map, but assuming you have access to map data, you could still roll your own REST API for whatever technology you are using (SQL 2008 Spatial comes to mind) and leverage the JavaScript API with no problems.  All good...

Recently I was working on a portion of a large ArcEngine development project in which we had requirements to draw a large number of point features in the map at changeable time intervals as short as ½ second in such a way as to avoid the map flashing or blinking at the user.  A brief look out on the ESRI site pointed me to the IDynamicMap interface and a pretty comprehensive example of how to use the dynamic map to rapidly render dynamic features.  There’s a whole nifty little dynamic display API that supports rendering in this environment.So off I went, charging down that alley and I subsequently bothered to carefully read the “destructions” as well as the limitations page describing what the tradeoffs are that you make when using it.  The two biggies that stood out immediately were the diminished rendering quality and the lack of support for labeling/annotation.  Sacrificing map quality and labeling for speed makes sense on an intellectual level , but wasn’t going to make the client happy because the maps that were being published for consumption by ArcEngine featured labels and annotation as a prominent part of the map content and the user base wasn’t going to accept funky looking maps.  Several other things that weren’t on the list reared their ugly heads only after I’d done some development and testing and were even bigger deal breakers for me…just thought I’d call them out here in case anyone else is evaluating this approach.

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Day one here in Palm Springs and I'm all checked in and got my “bag-o-swag” for the ESRI Dev Summit and am looking forward to the week’s events.  It’s been good to reconnect with a few colleagues that I haven’t seen in awhile and meet a few new folks.  Having been away from the Geospatial realm for a year or so before landing in my current position, it’s good to come back to the well and drink the kool-aid every once in awhile.  Attended the blog meetup last evening which provided a good opportunity for those of us who are constantly cross posting and tracking back to each other to put names with faces.

Lots of ArcGIS Server goodness on this year’s conference agenda which will be good for me.  I’ll be focusing primarily in the AGS realm; specifically on the SOAP and REST API topics in anticipation of several projects we have on the horizon.  We’ve got some mobile work on the docket as well so I’m encouraged to see a few sessions focusing on that.  The projects I’ve been on of late have been primarily ESRI desktop and Engine based so I’m looking to refine my skills in the web realm and brush up the rusty spots.  I’ll try to post several times over the course of the conference with random thoughts and impressions so stay tuned…

Yeah, I haven't been real regular about posting here lately, but we've been overrun with conference prep and putting out fires and the blog has taken a back seat.  Speaking of conferences...here's a shot of some of my crew at the GITA conference in Seattle.  http://virtualearth4gov.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!369B39F890CE30C1!779.entry?wa=wsignin1.0 We're sharing a booth with the VE guys at Microsoft.  Sorta funny to be able to call your sales manager and tell her to tuck her shirt in... Next week we're off to the ESRI conference so its a busy travel month for all.  More to follow...