Where do you get ArcGIS development questions answered?

Question

Where do you have the most success getting your ArcGIS development questions answered?

ESRI forums? Stack Overflow? Google? Mailing lists? Blog posts? ESRI documentation?

I can usually get answers to my ASP.NET/Oracle/JavaScript/C# questions in short order, but questions about ESRI products and APIs are a different matter. Posts founder in the forums, Google returns void, etc.

I'm sure this is not uncommon for niche commercial products, but frustrating nevertheless. What works for you? Please share.

Toxoid

Answer 1

Since its graduation in early 2011, the GIS Stack Exchange has grown to the point where it now has tags devoted to most, if not all, of the various developer tools for the ArcGIS Platform.

Click on sample links below to get an idea of its ArcGIS developer Q&As:

• arcpy
• arcobjects
• arcgis-server
• arcgis-javascript-api
• arcsde
• arcgis-engine
• arcgis-flex-api
• arcgis-silverlight-api

Kistna

GIS Stack Exchange is passed out of incubation and beta, and is now a full fledged SE site at http://gis.stackexchange.com/ – Honoria

Answer 2

I'm always frustrated by the ESRI forums. Search is poor, and there is a ton of duplicate information. I can't ever get an answer to really hard questions. I'm going to start posting ESRI and ArcObjects related questions and answers here in hope that it will become a go-to resource.

Hammy

Answer 3

While still lacking on the more obscure functions, their documentation for the 9.3 line of products is much more better than previous versions, including for the SDK.

You can check it out online here.

Fawkes

Answer 4

This is an irritating issue with ESRI ArcObjects's.

The best place is here:

http://edn.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=forums.gateway

Its the only real active place about ESRI ArcObjects.

Otherwise, if your using VC++/C#/VB.net, then use the included help (F1). But other than that there isn't much else. There isn't any sort of non-esri Arc community(except a chinese newsgroup). Also StackOverflow is pretty good :)

Aside from these the best and most common place i look is google, if you don't understand how something works or if you think your using it wrong.

E.g. If you have problems using ISaveAs(just an example). Google ISaveAs, look at other peoples code. If its an extremely specific/obscure ArcObject, then you won't find much help.

What API are you using?If its C++/COM then i suggest you rephrase the question and post it in their .net forums. To them C++ has been dead for years.

What exactly are you looking for help wise?

Hypsometry

That's what I was afraid of! I had hoped there was some community outside the ESRI forums that I didn't know about. We're kicking off a new project using the various ArcGIS Server APIs: REST, SOAP, and ArcObjects for C#/.NET (in order of preference). No particular questions at the moment, just trying to figure out where to look when they inevitably arise. Thanks for your thoughtful response. – Toxoid

Thats fine. You will probably actually be not that badily off, since ESRI's EDN is fairly well documented by comparision to their C++/C library :) If you have questions post them here and hopefully i will try and answer them. ArcObjects is a scary world. Also i would suggest renting a consultant from ESRI for a little bit. They are extremely knowledgeable, and will tell you if your deviating in the wrong way :) – Hypsometry

Answer 5

You will not get any answers from the ESRI forum so do not rely on that source of information for help. All you have when you dive into the world of ArcObjects and COM interop is the documentation, which in itself is good. Problem is some of their samples need updating.

If you are doing ArcGIS Server, then you can escape ArcObjects as their Silvelight/WPF API is written in C# and seems to have a cleaner API than ArcGIS Engine. Also, with their Silvelight/WPF API, you get modern looking controls. ArcGIS Engine controls look old by today's standard and they have no roadmap to change this in the near future. I discovered this the hard way.

I would recommend you also look at ThinkGeo. For a relatively new comer into the game of GIS, they have a good product as well as good support and an active forum.

Forced

Answer 6

Well, both EDN and user forums are really the best source of information. Yet, I must say, which is not much pleasure. For new APIs built upon ArcGIS Server, it feels better on resources.esri.com - at least there are many samples, and there's also community part (that rocks). Things are going better, I guess.

Do you have some contacts inside ESRI? For me, as an employee of local ESRI distributor, there is always possibility to write an e-mail to ESRI support, and from time to time I can really get back some valuable information. Unfortunately, this is time consuming.

As uberjumper has noted, most valuable are ESRI people themselves. During our user conference we always try to get as much information as possible from our visitors from ESRI, because - at least - you can get contact to person who can help you with particular problem, if the visitors doesn't know. And also, there are many people over the world who solve (or solved in the past) similar problems like you, StackOverflow perhaps becomes more and more important. :-)

Berl

Answer 7

There is also reasonably active discussion [Arc topics welcomed] on CartoTalk forum.

Arena