Second Thoughts on First Thoughts on ArcGIS 10

Shortly after ESRI announced the re-christening of ArcGIS 9.4 to ArcGIS 10.0, I posted this. In that post, I expressed doubt as to whether it would really live up to major release status.

After having worked with ArcGIS 10 for a little while now, I feel it necessary to say that I was wrong. Due to the nature of recent projects, I have been experimenting mostly with Desktop. At the FedUC, it looked really impressive in demos up on the big screen but those were demos up on the big screen.

Working with the release candidate, I have found it to be impressively fast and stable with fairly modest hardware resources. Many processes seem to run in the background where they used to lock ArcMap and prevent you from working. Also, the updated UI is a breath of fresh air. These things, combined with many other improvements, have convinced me that the move up to 10.0 was justified, as it is obvious that major restructuring has occurred. I’m still digging into how it may affect some of my previously-existing code but there’s really nothing that scares me about that. I’ll blog about the code migration in future posts, I’m sure.

Given what I had previously posted, I felt it only fair to correct it based upon what I have observed. It looks like some good work from the folks in Redlands and I am looking forward to the full release.