MapWindow to .NET

The MapWindow open-source project will be holding its first-ever user conference from March 31 to April 2, 2010 in Orlando, Florida. Aside from being a great milestone for MapWindow, it is also being billed as a “coming out party” for MapWindow 6, its first native .NET version.

For those of you who are not familiar with MapWindow, it is and open-source (MPL 1.1) mapping library (think SharpMap or MapObjects) for use in developing applications, managed by the Geospatial Software Lab at Idaho State University. Although its desktop application and some geoprocessing tools have been written in .NET (VB.NET and C# respectively) for some time, the main library has been a 32-bit ActiveX control written in C++. At version 6, it will finally be fully .NET.

I had used MapWindow a little bit some years ago but haven’t recently due to its ActiveX structure. I will definitely add it to my (ever-growing) list of things to check out now that it’s been ported.