Martin's Blog

Why is it so hard to buy a map engine to be embedded into a .NET WPF desktop application? When developing your typical command and control system, selecting a GIS component to embed into your WPF based client can be really difficult.

The choices available are either too limited with regards to supported map data formats, requires data pre-processing or have wholly inadequate licensing models, pricing or both. Most, if not all of the better choices are based on ActiveX which makes them somewhat cumbersome to embed in clients built on WPF.

Many organizations are moving to more agile development processes where specific architectural roles are often discouraged. Everybody are expected to be able to work on the complete application stack and that means having access to all the tools needed, including the map engine SDK. Pricing and licensing really becomes an issue for teams wanting to stay truly agile.

I feel that WPF is about to finally break through in corporate business applications. Silverlight has made a difference and the tooling, both the Expression suite and Visual Studio 2010 is getting there, albeit a little late, perhaps. This could mean trouble for the established vendors if they don’t act to accommodate this growing market.

I would like to see a map engine component that does the following:

• Native .NET WPF control
• Reference system supported canvas for drawing on layers
• Complete documentation with a rich set of samples
• $499 for the SDK
• No charge for the runtime

I think that there might be a feature list in there somewhere that includes just the right amount of functionality that perfectly executed could have fantastic potential. What do you think?