ThinkGeo Releases First Public Beta of Map Suite Desktop Edition 3.0, A .NET control for building WPF and Winforms GIS applications Options

[ThinkGeo]

Greetings all,

We at ThinkGeo have just released the initial public beta of Map Suite Desktop Edition 3.0, the next major version of our native .NET control that lets you build GIS functionality into your Windows desktop applications. If you're developing in .NET, we've got a 60-day free trial of the new version that you can grab from our website.

We've had a lot of customer demand to add a WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) control, so we're pleased to announce that Map Suite Desktop Edition 3.0 now includes both WPF and Winforms map controls. It also has a newly-designed, rich API that allows you to build all manner of GIS applications. At its heart are the new Map Suite 3.0 core classes; these include all of our styles, data providers, and geometric operations. Here are some of the features in this beta:

1. Winforms and WPF Map Controls
2. Drag and Drop Panning
3. Double-Click Zooming
4. Mouse Wheel Support for Zooming
5. Dynamic Refreshing
6. Core Feature Layers (Shapefile, MS SQL 2008, Oracle Spatial, Postgre, GRID, etc.)
7. Full Editing Transaction System
8. WMS Support
9. Core Raster Layers (ECW, MrSid, JPEG2000, TIFF, BMP, PNG, JPG, etc.)
10. Core Styles (Class Break, Value, Regex, Area, Point, Line, Text, Icon, etc.)
11. Core Shape (Point, Polygon, Line, Rectangle, Ellipse, etc.)
12. Spatial Querying (Containing, Overlap, Intersects, Nearest Neighbor, etc.)
13. Spatial Operations (Union, Buffer, Difference, Symmetrical Difference, etc.)
14. Predefined Zoom Levels to Assist Drawing
15. High Performance Shapefile Spatial Indexing
16. Thousands of Supported Projections (Proj4, ProjNet, GeoTrans, Custom Projections, EPSG, etc.)
17. Advanced Graphing with ZedGraph
18. Dozens of Geographic Styles (Local Roads, Highways, Rivers, Countries, Capitals, etc.)
19. Extensible Framework to Create Your Own Styles, Shapes, Canvases, Feature Sources, Raster Sources, etc.
20. Dozens of Sample Application in C#
21. Well-Known Binary (WKB) & Text (WKT) Support
22. Advanced Drawing Pens & Bushes (Linear Gradients, Hatch Patterns, Bitmap Brushes , Bitmap Pens, etc.)
23. Geographic Helper Functions (Conversion Between World & Screen Point, Formatting Decimal Degrees, etc.)
24. Zooming Helpers Functions (Zoom to Feature, Zoom to Groups of Features, Center, Zoom to Scale, etc.)
25. Adornment Layer (Scale Line, Scale Bar, Logo, Watermark, etc.)
26. Advanced Labeling (Predictive Labeling, Best Placement, Wrapping, Collision Handling, etc.)

We left some things out of the first beta so we could get it into the hands of developers as soon as possible. Here's what we still need to add over the next few weeks:

1. Continuous Panning
2. Drawing Track Shapes
3. Multi-threaded UI
4. Local Tiling & Caching
5. Auto Refresh of Dynamic Layers
6. Visual Shape Editing
7. Click & Query
8. Zooming Transition Effects
9. VB.NET Sample Applications

If anybody is interested in giving the beta a try, let us know what you think. This is your opportunity to provide input and drive the direction and new features in the Desktop Edition. Feel free to drop by our forums if you have any questions or need some help; there are always some of our developers monitoring them so they can help you out.

Thanks!