Dave Bouwman Releases the ArcGIS Server Virtual Earth Tile Server

February 4th, 2008 · 14 Comments · ArcGIS Server, ESRI, Microsoft, Virtual Earth

Dave Bouwman has cleaned up his AGS Virtual Earth Tile Server and has posted the code.

• HttpHandler (.ashx)that responds to Tile requests from Virtual Earth
• Supports multiple layers/map services through the same handler
• ArcGIS Server Tile Provider uses the AGS SOAP API (fast!)
• Projects the data - can be used with any ArcGIS Server map service
• Extensible design allows for additional Tile Providers - i.e. ArcIMS, Image Server
• Extensible design allows for additional storage providers - i.e. Amazon S3, DBMS
• Easy to use - just edit the web.config file

Dave hopes to add providers for both WMS and ArcIMS services. Some of the history behind why this project was developed can be found in a blog post from a couple weeks ago.

This is why a RESTful API is so important to development of ArcGIS Server. Rather than being tied down to the WebADF, you can start using ArcGIS Server in ways that we haven’t before. Just because you are the ESRI Server Stack shouldn’t limit you to using only the ESRI ADFs. We’ll be seeing more about this in the next few weeks running up to the DevSummit from many folks as we start getting organized with ESRI ArcGIS Server community development. If you use .NET with ArcGIS Server, get involved with ArcDeveloper.net.