I was working my way through this ESRI Walkthrough: Building custom UI elements using add-ins (ArcObjects .NET 10 SDK). And came across a couple minor errors that I had to correct during the process. First, while implementing the OnClick() code for ZoomToLayer.vb, Visual Studio gave me a ‘Name ‘ArcMap’ is not declared.' error. In the walk-through, they mention that the ArcMap method of your class. For me, however, it appeared under the .

NOTE: I have a post here that shows how to check if a field exists using arcpy in ArcGIS 10.0. In developing a python script to reload a geodatabase, I wanted to create any necessary indexes. No problem creating the index, for example: gp.AddIndex_management(tablename, field, IndexName, "NON_UNIQUE", "NON_ASCENDING") But before creating the index, I wanted to verify that it did not exist. I tried the ever-popular, exists but could not get it to work–either it does not detect indexes or I just never got the fully-qualified name for the index right (ArcSDE using a postgres datastore).

We finally installed an instance of ArcSDE 10 today. My first attempt at connecting in ArcCatalog 9.3.1 failed with the following error: Failed to connect to the specified server. This release of the GeoDatabase is either invalid or out of date. [Please run the ArcSDE setup utility using the -o install option.] DBMS table not found [sde.sde.GDB_Release]  Turns out the solution was simple, this article points out that Service pack 2 is required.

Subtitled: Why error messages are good. Came up with another error while running TopoToRaster but this time ArcGIS gave an error message that led to a solution. Turned out all my contour lines had an elevation of 16 which TopoToRaster did not like. I had intended to increase the elevation and inadvertently set them all to sixteen. I had saved the previous values before editing so it turned out to be a simple fix and I didn’t have to spend a day trying figure out what was wrong.

In running an automated process, I had a TopoToRaster repeatedly fail on me. The only input theme was a contour theme. The process ran fine when I used the envelope of the contour theme as the output extent but when I changed it to the envelope of a polygon theme, it would bomb. The polygon’s envelope was smaller than the contour theme. ArcCatalog would bomb out without presenting any sort of useful message.

I have been working on updating some data that was published using Arc/Info Workstation Export (.e00) files, converting them to shapefiles, or in the case of annotation, to a geodatabase feature class. While converting some INFO tables, I have received this error: It turns out that Workstation can create export files that contain values that did not fit within their field–I’m guessing that somehow you are actually able to enter invalid values into those fields but I did not confirm that.

Right before the Users Conference, ESRI has released ArcGIS Desktop 9.3.1 Service Pack Haven’t had a chance to see what bugs this addresses yet.

Came across a new ArcMap bug today. A staff member was trying to join an Excel 2007 file (.xlsx) to a point shapefile in ArcMap and it did not appear to be working. She only had Office 2003 on her machine so I tried it on my spanking new machine that has 2007 installed. Same result–the fields get appended but they are all blank. I discovered, however, that when I had the table open, if I switched form showing ALL records to only the selected, Poof!