Microsoft now is a OGC member

That's true, just read this press release.

From the Microsoft point of view, this seams like a logical move as some of their flagship products (SQL Server 2008 and Virtual Earth) will include or already include spatial support. What this also means is that for sure MS products will support the OGC standards witch is very good news.

I'm a confess addicted to OGC standards, even wen using third-party engines that do not provide the standard interfaces, I tend to create a abstraction for OGC compliancy.

With all that said, I welcome Microsoft move to join the Open Geospatial Consortium.

Funny Things

They do happen. I was just checking this blog stats on Google Analytics and I found out that Rob Relyea as a post on in his blog referring to this one.

Funny is that by linking to his post, I spent some time reading Rob's blog and decided to give Windows Live Writer a try.

In one word.... it's good. Worked as a charm with my blog. It's a really good piece of software that I highly recommend to everyone that has is one blog.

The software detected my blog settings (including the provider although I'm using a personal server to host it). The
Live Writer editor is far better than blogger online editor. It has spelling, advanced html features, blogger tags (shows up as writer categories). It is also capable of showing a post preview that is fast and works very well

It's a 5 start's award proving that Microsoft is able to provide really good and free software.

SVG GIS applications destined to disappearance

I’ve been developing, extending and maintaining one SVG based GIS application for the last 4 years. I’ve learned a lot in the last year’s and revived some of my math knowledge’s (geometry).

Well... this post is about SVG and GIS and not me… let me just say, that 4 years ago SVG was a good promising technology supported by a W3C standard, and some big companies behind it (like Adobe and Corel).

Adobe and Corel were providing a free SVG View plugin for both explorer and mozilla, and that was the only thing necessary to start viewing SVG enabled web sites.

After analyzing some competitors in the mapping industry we had no doubt to go with the W3C supported standard and we used SVG, back then it was clearly the best option for anyone starting a web browser GIS application.

In the last year's a few events occurred that are important and were major step back in pushing SVG into the web browser:

1. The continuous delay for the new speciation version (1.2 is still not final…), Adobe witch in time had a version 6 of the SVG Viewer plugin available for download, pulled it out, binding it’s release to the final release of the 1.2 SVG specification.

2. During the year 2005 Adobe acquired Macromedia, and therefore became the Macromedia Flash owner. Flash can somehow be seen as an SVG competitor although not so used in GIS applications.

3. Internet Explorer 7 was released and not SVG support was included despite the rumors saying just the opposite.

4. Since the Macromedia acquisition, it was clear that SVG viewer wasn’t a flag product for Adobe, and also that it was nonsense in its goal towards extending Flash usage. So it was not very surprising to know that the Adobe SVG viewer was being discontinued while acknowledging it will never be supported in Windows Vista.
So after January 1st of 2008 there’s no more SVG viewer, you can consult the Adobe End of Life FAQ here.
After issuing the EOL statement and under pressure by the SVG community, Adobe have agreed to extend the viewer distribution indefinitely, but sit no new version will be developed.

Here we are today, and we’ve no major company behind SVG (Corel also stopped their SVG viewer development). And there’s a new player in the market, Microsoft will support XAML in the browser.
Converting from SVG to XAML is rather simple, and somehow the pass as proven, so chances are high that Microsoft will succeed, therefore probably SilverLight will be a winner.

Gradually GIS applications based on SVG will start there way into SilverLight or Flash, probably Esri and Intergraph will start supporting one of those technologies, and a few hears from now probably the SVG usage in the browser will fade. More certainly SVG GIS applications are destined to disappearance.


I believe SVG may survive as a technology, later there is a push to take SVG to the mobile (cell phone/PDA market), and some Cell Phone companies have added SVG support in their devices.

For me, we’ve scheduled the change of our mapping SVG GIS application to SilverLigth by the last quarter of this year.

Microsoft Silverlight

WPF/E is now Microsoft Silverlight... well at least this is a more commercial name for the tool.
Why am I interested in Silverlight ? Well I’m using SVG and Adobe SVG Viewer for web mapping. A while ago Adobe has announced it will discontinue the support for their SVG Viewer, since then I pointed XAML and by consequence WPF/E (now Silverlight) as the next step.
For now here are a few useful links for Silverlight:

Official Site

Tina Wood’s blog on MSDN Channel 10 interviewing Sean Alexander

Silverlight Community Site (after April 30)

Silverlight Dev Center on MSDN