Announcing: MapGuide Maestro 6.0 Alpha 1

It has been 4 years since I took over development of MapGuide Maestro. In those 4 years, Maestro has evolved to the point where I now believe that for a MapGuide Server authoring application, the design space of Maestro in my opinion, has been mostly fully explored. There isn't really much left for me to do

So as I see it, 6.0 will be my final major release of Maestro. Since this is going to be my final release, we should release early and often so that when 6.0 does finally drop, it will be what I consider to be complete and finished. The road to MapGuide Maestro 6.0 will be my "farewell tour" for this piece of software.

So with that said, here's the first alpha release of MapGuide Maestro 6.0. Here's what's new

New Grid-based Style Editor

A new grid-based style editor replaces the existing control-based style editor.

The old control-based style editor can be restored through the Maestro options. Note: In my tests on Mono, the new grid-based editor does not work, so you'll have to revert back to the old style editor.

Web Layout v2.6.0

The new Web Layout schema has specialized editor support in anticipation of the release of MapGuide Open Source 2.6.

Theming improvements

You can now generate themes based on values from an external Class Definition (eg. A lookup table)

Also, you can now also generate LOOKUP() theme expressions via the Expression Editor. This can be accessed from the Tools menu of the Expression Editor and uses the existing Theme Builder UI.

You can also generate themes for composite styles as well (in most cases).

Advanced Stylization improvements

Thanks to the grid-based style editor, you can now see such style previews inline.

Also we've made the mega-verbose Composite Symbolization dialog a bit more accessible.

Component Symbol Definitions of a Composite Symbolization now also have previews so you can see how the component Symbol Definitions are assembled to the final preview.

Secondly, you can edit the XML of the Composite Symbolization if you know what you're doing and the existing UI is a bit too hard for you to navigate through.

Other improvements

MgCooker now provides you the ability to auto-calculate the meters-per-unit value required for tile generation via the official method.

Calculation uses the following methods based on availability:

• The new CREATERUNTIMEMAP operation that will contain the meters-per-unit value (requires a MapGuide OS 2.6 Server)
• The output of a new MpuCalc.exe which taps into the MgCoordinateSystem API provided by the local mg-desktop installation (windows only).

Bad Feature Source, Feature Class and Geometry fields are flagged when you open a bad Layer Definition

The XML diff UI has been tweaked to combine the source/target views so you can scroll thorough both sides in sync.

A new context menu command is available that lets you diff 2 different resources of the same type using the refined Diff UI.

A new context menu command is available to let you get the spatial context information for a Layer Definition

A new context menu command is available to let you create image-based Symbol Definitions from a Symbol Library.

The resource picker has some extra navigation shortcuts

And if you're picking Symbol Definitions, you can now preview them inline

Finally, we leverage the new-found use of Watermarks to inject useful debugging information to most resource previews.

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