Manual Mapwin

Getting Started With the MapWinGIS ActiveX Control
By Daniel P. Ames, PhD, PE

-1DRAFT

Copyright 2006 Daniel P. Ames All Rights Reserved. Printed in the United States of America

The names of companies and products herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective trademark owners. Revision 0.1

-2DRAFT

To Mrs. Brassey

-3DRAFT

ContentsPREFACE................................................................................................................5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.......................................................................................7 1 GIS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PARADIGMS........................................8 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MAPWINGIS..................................................12 GETTING THE LATEST VERSION OFMAPWINGIS................................................12 REGISTERING THE MAPWINGIS ACTIVEX ON YOUR SYSTEM ............................14 CREATING A REFERENCE TO MAPWINGIS IN VISUAL BASIC 2005 EXPRESS EDITION...............................................................................................................16 ADDING A MAP COMPONENT TO YOUR VISUAL BASICFORM..............................18 ADDING A SHAPEFILE DATA LAYER TO YOUR MAP ............................................19 CREATING ZOOM AND PAN BUTTONS .................................................................22 3 SHAPEFILE DISPLAY, COLORING SCHEMES, AND LABELS ............25 ADJUSTING SHAPEFILE DISPLAY PROPERTIES .....................................................25 SETTING A COLORING SCHEME...........................................................................31 USING A POINT IMAGE LIST ................................................................................34 LABELING FEATURES ..........................................................................................37

-4DRAFT

Preface
In 1998 I discovered the magical world of object oriented programming and component architecturesoftware. This was a wonderful discovery for a guy who began programming with the BASIC language (TRS-80 Model 1) at age 12 and later was formally trained in the FORTRAN language while at college. As many have done before me, I immediately recognized the value of reusing code and objects and began developing simple ActiveX components in Visual Basic 5.0 (some of which are still available fordownload from my legacy web-site, http://www.StonehavenSoftware.com.) At about the same time, I began work on a fascinating and challenging doctoral research project that had a large GIS software development aspect. My fellow students and I originally began to write the needed code using the ESRI® MapObjects® product. While this product was robust and effective for most of our needs, it had a fewfunctional deficiencies for our particular project and, perhaps more significantly, it had an associated license that would make our product cost-prohibitive to redistribute. The world of free and open source GIS was still in its infancy at that time, and there were no free or open source GIS mapping components

-5DRAFT

available specifically for use in rapid application development environmentssuch as Visual Basic. As a result, our research group began developing our own mapping components. The first version of the MapWindow MapWinGIS ActiveX control was released in 2002 and was made available to users of our products free of charge. In early 2004, the Idaho National Laboratory, a major federal funding source for our research, released much of the MapWindow project source code to thepublic domain. In August 2004, I took a position at Idaho State University and brought the public domain source code with me for continued development and use. At that time, I was encouraged by colleagues at AQUA TERRA Consultants (http://www.aquaterra.com) to release MapWinGIS and its associated graphical user interface, MapWindow GIS, as open source software. In January 2005 a new web site,...