Thinking in GIS

In the next stops I will write a tutorial about programming MapServer with .NET c#.

This tutorial will try to guide you step by step in implementing a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) web solution, based on Open Source software (MapServer and PostGIS), within the .NET Framework.

How to download the tutorial

The tutorial's data needed to complete this tutorial are downloadable here. In any case the tutorial is made in a way that you can easily adapt to use your own data (shapefiles).

Here you can find a complete working Visual Studio 2003 solution (ASP .NET 1.1) with the whole tutorial's solution.

Take a look at a working online demo of the tutorial

Before beginning following the tutorial's steps you can take a look at a working online demo of it: try to navigate the map (zoom in, zoom out), identify features on the active layer, add features (and attributes) to a point layer (POI), restore (clear) the point layer where you have added the features, switch on/off layers visibility.

Tutorial's audience

The tutorial is designed to work with Visual Studio 2003 and .NET 1.1, but you will easily be able to perform all the necessary steps to complete it using another version of Visual Studio (ie: Visual Studio 2005) or other IDEs (like Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition or even the notepad). It will work also using .NET 2 as c# mapscript is .NET 2 compatible.

The tutorial is focused to people with knowledge of C# (but can be easily implemented with .NET Visual Basic) and the .NET framework, and with some background in GIS. If you are new to GIS, a good place to start is here.

This tutorial could be easily adapted for other languages and frameworks rather than C# (or VB) and Microsoft .NET Framewok. In fact the Open Source component we are going to use (MapServer) is also available for PHP, Java, Ruby, Python and other languages.

As we will implement a C# ASP .NET Application, take care about this issue (that should be solved in the future): MapServer thread safety and about plans to solve this issue.