Maestro tip: Editing session resources

So ... You know about that resource ID "address bar" which I've introduced to MapGuide Maestro 5.0 since beta 4?

That thing also takes session-based resource IDs. Thus, assuming you connected as an Administrator you can use this address bar to also open session-based resources and view/edit them. A nice way to debug any code you have that works with session-based resources.

Now sadly there's currently no way to open a resource ID from the "address bar" using the Generic XML editor. So for the next release we're going to fix that, by letting you choose which editor you want to open the resource with: The designated one or the Generic XML editor

Credit to Crispin Hoult for the original discovery.

EDIT: Correction. It seems you can only view session resources at the moment with this technique and not be able to edit them as saving will prompt you to save back into the site repository. We're gonna have to do something about that.

Fresh from the lab

I'm sure we all agree that software releases are generally marketed like a bunch of bullet points.

I think I found one such bullet point for the next post-5.0 release of Maestro!

Maestro tip: Re-organizing editor windows

Sometimes, this author himself discovers something useful about the application he built that he himself didn't know was possible but with some reflection and hindsight, it was obviously clear such a thing could be possible due to some important decisions made in the choice of libraries, components and design.

In this particular case: the decision to use the DockPanel Suite library for MapGuide Maestro 5.0.

DockPanel Suite allows Maestro to lay out its top-level UI elements in a flexible manner akin to Visual Studio. So what this means is that if you have a bunch of open editors like this

You can drag one of the editor tabs and pull it out. You'll get a nice visual indicator of where you want to drop the editor tab just like in Visual Studio.

Release the mouse at the desired drop location and presto!

Very useful if you ever want to see 2 or more open resources side-by-side for basic comparison. Something nice to remember if you have a lot of screen real estate to play with

MapGuide tidbits: Coordinate System support in mg-desktop

Here's a quick tidbit about Coordinate Systems in mg-desktop.

Whether you're using the zip distribution of mg-desktop or you installed the cs-map-dictionaries NuGet package, your mg-desktop application will not be supporting the full set of several-thousand-odd coordinate systems that any other application using CS-Map does.

The reason for this is simply: size.

NuGet has a 30mb limit on its package files, so the decision was made to have a stripped-down set of coordinate system dictionary files to support the NuGet user story. Similarly, the zip distribution of mg-desktop contains a stripped-down subset for the same reason: If you're building an mg-desktop application, you probably don't need to support all 4000+ coordinate systems and chances are the coordinate system you're working with will be in this stripped-down subset.

So what coordinate system files did we strip out for mg-desktop? All the country-specific grid files have been stripped out.

So now the question becomes: How can I use a coordinate system that's in one of these country grid files in my mg-desktop application?

The answer is to simply take a copy of the grid file(s) from an equivalent installation of MapGuide Open Source (ie. A MapGuide with the same major.minor version number as your version of mg-desktop). If you don't have MGOS installed, you can take a copy of the grid file(s) from the equivalent MapGuide InstantSetup bundle.

Drop one or more of these folders into your mg-desktop application's Dictionaries folder and your mg-desktop application should now support the coordinate systems defined in this grid files as well.