sharpgis.net

What It Is

sharpgis.net is a personal technical blog by dotMorten / Morten Nielsen, titled “.NET Ramblings, XAML hacking and some GIS endeavors.” Based on the crawled content, it mainly publishes technical articles, conference notes, and experimental write-ups around .NET, XAML, WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, ESRI/ArcGIS, SharpMap, GIS, Kinect, and related topics. Strictly speaking, it is not a forum platform or a commercial SaaS product, but a personal technical content site; among the given categories, it is closest to a technical blog under “forum/community.”

Core Features

The site offers category-based browsing of technical articles, RSS/OPML subscriptions, comment links, and embedded images and videos. The content is practice-oriented, covering topics such as reusing .NET code across Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone; notes from the ESRI Developer Summit; and implementation ideas for map interaction prototypes using Kinect, WPF, and the ArcGIS API. For developers researching early ArcGIS client-side development, the XAML ecosystem, and GIS visualization interactions, it has some archival value.

Pricing

The crawled content does not show any paywall, membership system, course sales, or commercial subscription. It can be considered a personal blog that is primarily free to read publicly.

Pros and Cons

The main advantage is that the content comes from real development and conference scenarios, with more technical depth than ordinary news-style posts. Its coverage of the intersection between GIS and the Microsoft client technology stack is particularly distinctive. Categories include ArcGIS Server, ESRI, GIS, SharpMap, Silverlight, JavaScript, IoT, and more, making it easier to look back by topic.

The drawbacks are also clear: many posts are clustered around 2011, and ecosystems such as Silverlight and Windows Phone have since been discontinued. Some code and external links may no longer work. The articles are not structured tutorials, so readers need a fairly strong technical background to extract value from them. The site also does not function like a modern developer community with active Q&A, versioned documentation, or an explicit commitment to ongoing maintenance.

Who It’s For

It is suitable for GIS/.NET developers, researchers of the ArcGIS ecosystem, people looking for background material for migrating legacy projects, and technical readers interested in WPF, XAML, and Kinect interaction prototypes. It is less suitable for beginners learning GIS from scratch or users looking for the latest cloud GIS solutions.

Access from China

The site itself uses an independent domain and HTTPS, so its pages should theoretically be directly accessible. However, embedded YouTube videos and some overseas external links in the articles are usually not accessible from mainland China. Overall, access can be considered “partially restricted.”