I was helping a co-worker who needed to check if a field exists in their arcpy script. Since we were located at their computer, I thought I would just do a quick Google search and pull the code off this blog. Seemed logical since I the original purpose was exactly that—to serve as a handy, public place to store code snippets that I use & that others might find handy.

Question: How do I get ArcMap to automatically pan through an area. As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently had the need to have ArcMap automatically pan through a project area. My first attempt was to print a series of data-driven pages (using a fishnet polygon layer as the index) this but that did not accomplish what I needed so I switched to arcpy, which made the task simple enough.

I recently had an internal request to capture and store the Bing imagery for an area for future use. The user was interested in some specific images that were taken after a fire, making the ground surface-and certain geological features-much more visible. His concern was that in the future this imagery might get replaced with updated imagery taken when the vegetation has grown back. Since it is unknown when/how this data might be used by us, we mostly wanted to capture it now & find a way to use it.

For some odd reason, I wanted to split all the arcs in a polyline feature class to a specific length–if a specific feature was longer than the target length, it would become two or more separate polyline records. Here is the bare-bones script that copies an existing feature class into a new feature class then processes each record, splitting it into multiple records if the polyline is longer than the user-specified tolerance.

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 .

Stumbled across ArcBruTile, an ArcMap application that allows you to display map tile services–such as OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, Bing, Spatial Cloud, and Tile Map Service (TMS)–in your ArcMap documents. It works pretty well from my preliminary testing of it. I have found that at times that the graphical tiles are distorted but I am guessing it is because they are optimized for display in a specific projection, at specific scales and, in ArcMap, you can use any projection/scale combination you want.

Maybe I am just dense, but skimming ArcIdeas, I found out that the transparency for an icon is determined by the upper-left pixel. Don’t know if this is an ESRI convention or not but thought I would pass it one.