Wednesday, 10 September 2025

Announcing: MapGuide Open Source 4.0 RC1 and MapGuide Portable

We're on the home stretch now!

The first (and hopefully only) release candidate of MapGuide Open Source 4.0 is now available.

Changes since Beta 3

This release has the following changes since Beta 3:

  • A new .net repository admin tool that replaces the existing series of PHP scripts that required a super-ancient PHP binary.
  • Apache httpd updated to 2.4.65
  • PHP updated to 8.3.25
  • Tomcat updated to 9.0.108
  • Plugged a memory leak in selection processing if it throws an FDO exception
  • The .net bindings now have experimental support for Linux

New nuget packages

As a test run for the final release, the .net bindings have also been published to nuget.
To get started building a .net MapGuide application for 4.0 RC1, install the above packages (ver 4.0.0.10185) via the nuget package manager or via the dotnet CLI.

Need an idea or example of how to build a MapGuide application using these packages in modern asp.net core? Have a look at the mvc core sample.

As already stated, these bindings also have experimental support for Linux, meaning you can publish your .net application to run on Linux as opposed to Windows. Here's a screenshot of the mvc core sample application published to and running on Linux, talking to a MapGuide Server also on Linux being contacted from a web browser on Windows.


MapGuide Portable

The sub-project formerly known as mg-desktop is now known as MapGuide Portable (or mg-portable).

Why the name change? The "desktop" moniker felt too constricting. You're not exclusively tied to building just desktop applications. You could build "headless" console applications or maybe even MapGuide Server-free web applications with this library. As such, "portable" is the better moniker as it is a MapGuide Platform that goes with your application, in effect being portable.

Why are we mentioning MapGuide Portable in a 4.0 RC1 announcement? Because our extensive work on generating API bindings with vanilla SWIG had some minor splash damage. As MapGuide Portable builds on top of the shared Foundation/Geometry/PlatformBase series of libraries, we'd be leaving this in the lurch if we got these new fancy .net bindings for MapGuide proper, but still had to resort to the old crufty legacy bindings for MapGuide Portable, so extra effort was spent to get the .net bindings for MapGuide Portable to not only be generated through vanilla SWIG as well, but also retain package modularity by being able to depend on the new Foundation/Geometry/PlatformBase nuget packages.

The end result is a new series of nuget packages that you can use either in a legacy .net Framework 4.8 WinForms application or a WinForms application in the new modern .net!


Unlike the proper MapGuide API nuget packages, the MapGuide Portable packages are still Windows-only (since WinForms is tied to Windows). The new MapGuide Portable packages are:
The older mg-desktop-* packages on nuget should be considered deprecated and you should move over to these new MapGuide Portable nuget packages as these packages support modern .net while the mg-desktop-* packages can only be used in legacy .net Framework.

The final stretch

Between RC1 and the Final release I will be primarily focusing on an API documentation sweep, getting functional API documentation up and ready. Only bugs of a show-stopping nature will be addressed and only if such bugs have easy means of reproducing (I can only do so much). I am allowing for up to a month for this development window before the Final release, so that we can wrap things up before Windows 10 reaches end of life, just over a month from now.

This long and arduous journey is almost at an end!

Posted by Jackie Ng at 22:41 0 comments
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