Eating your own dogfood

For those who haven't heard the term, eating your own dog food as defined in Wikipedia:

Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is a slang term used to reference a scenario in which a company (usually, a software company) uses its own product to demonstrate the quality and capabilities of the product

For the next beta of Maestro, we're doing some dogfooding of our own. The new Map Viewer component, will now be the default method for previewing the following types of resources across all connection types

• Layer Definitions
• Map Definitions
• Watermark Definitions

Where previously, a web browser would be launched (if using a http connection) or a mg-desktop based viewer would be loaded (if using a local connection), for such resources we have our own preview UI built on top of the Maestro Map Viewer component (which also works in Mono)

The main benefit of this method of previewing becomes apparent when you try to preview layers with restricted scale ranges. The default method (launching the AJAX viewer) for such layers will usually result in seeing nothing as we don't have the ability to pass on the initial opening scale to the AJAX viewer nor do we have the required information to adjust the preview bounds. That's why as a workaround, we put in a "Zoom to Scale" command under the "Tools" menu of the preview Web Layout to let you easily zoom into the layer's visible scale range.

With the new preview method, the preview map viewer will automatically adjust its initial scale to fit into the layer's scale range, eliminating the need to manually zoom into the layer's visible scale range.

This feature is optional, and if you still prefer the old way of previewing resources, you can simply uncheck the option.

Next beta is almost here. There's some Mono-related bugs/annoyances to fix up