Thinking in GIS

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), within the .NET Framework.

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 and Python, and other languages.

The whole tutorial is downloadable: address you can find the data (shapefiles) necessary to complete the tutorial (but you can easily adapt your data) here, and a complete working Visual Studio 2003 solution with this tutorial's code here.

You can take a look at a working online demo of this tutorial here.

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.

Index of Tutorial

Introduction

1. Introduction to MapServer Web GIS development environment

2. Installing MapServer

3. Creating the MapFile and data configuration

4. Designing the tutorial user interface

5. Implementing the C# mapscript code

6. Migrating shapefiles to PostGIS

7. Connection MapFile layer to PostGIS

8. Adapting C# code to work indifferently with shapefile or PostGIS layers

And if the tutorial is not working for you (you get compilation errors, maps are not displayed, editing is not working...), please take a look here