Steve,
I wanted to let you know what is coming with the release candidate for the Desktop Edition. It has been a long time since the last release and what we decided from then was what we were offering just wasn’t good enough to be the best. We took a fresh look at all the technologies and techniques at our disposal and came up with some great ways to enhance the system, lower CPU utilization, and give the map a great feel.
We enabled the multi threading again and have test it with a large number of scenarios. We have done what we can to keep you thread safe by default however if you inherit from the control or keep instance without using our properties then you need to protect yourself. To facilitate this we have a SyncRoot property that we suggest you lock on whenever you are going to manipulate the map. As I said if you use properties or methods then we handle this. We also have an option to turn it off as well.
The entire panning, zooming and drawing system was replaced with a threaded tiled system. Regardless of if you use caching we will cache tiles internally in a sort of temporary caching system. This means moving back over areas you have previously draw is lightning fast, think Google maps. The entire goal of the tiled system was to do all the heavy drawing on other threads and to always have the main UI thread responsive no matter what. The caching is by overlay so we allow you to invalidate a single overlay. This is useful when only certain layers change. Now that we have this default level caching we needed to allow you to signal us that either one of two things happened. The first is that you changed the extent like panning, zooming etc. For this we still use Map.Refresh. When you call this we keep the current caches we will just update the position. If for some reason your styles changed or you manipulated the data of a overlay then you can invalidate our cache using the Map.Redraw(Overlay) method. This lets us know we can abandon the cache because it is no longer valid. You can do this as often as you want as getting rid of caches is something we expect will happen quite frequently for certain overlays.
We talked with a number of customers and based on feedback enhanced our editing system. We now have an easily extensible system that will allow us to meet any advanced editing requirements. We have also enhanced the look and feel of editing. We added the functionality to delete and add vertexes anywhere on a line instead of just the center. As part of the editing system overhaul we came up with the idea of IntereactiveOverlays. These classes are overlays all respects however they can also respond to system events like mouse click, double click, mouse move, etc. We have implemented all of our interactions on this model. For example editing, panning, track zooming, mouse wheel, track shape drawing etc are all now interactive overlays. You can enhance our current ones or build your own to get any kind of interactive effect you require.
If you can hold out another week then you can checkout the new and vastly improved Desktop Edition. I think you will be very satisfied with the enhancements.
David
