In this mid-term post I will talk about the achievements I’ve reached so far. I will also address what is to come and the minor challenges I face during development.

The release of WPS.NET

At first, we imagined the project as a single base that was separated internally – the ArcGIS Pro add-in and the WPS module, which was the current library. A couple of weeks after the start of the development, we decided to split these two modules apart and have two entirely separated projects. The library is now extensible and can be used by anyone in any project. It is downloadable from NuGet and accessible to the open public. Future updates are going to come soon for eventual fixes and design upgrades.

What’s next?

The construction for the add-in debuted about one week ago. After polishing the WPS library, I have started to create the UI and write the boiler plate allowing to implement Model-View-Viewmodel (MVVM) in this project architecture. The UI will look similar to the previously implemented WPS client in ArcMap. As described in the project proposal, MVVM will help us future proof this add-in and prevent future useless rewrites. As for the integration of several functionalities, such as including a bounding box, the challenges are yet to come. We’re looking into making our integration as intuitive and easy as possible.

The difficult parts

As of now, I have mostly done individual projects to improve my programming skills as much as I could. Thus I didn’t realize how important communication was. Writing code in a manner that is easily picked up by someone else and continued in the same direction as you designed it, is hard. In addition, I still have some struggles with the technical part. I am fairly new to the ArcGIS Pro SDK and geoprocessing, so some aspects are unclear. So far I am still optimistic on the final result.