Write MapWindow GIS Plugins

MapWindow has an extensible architecture that allows you to write plugins to add functionality using Visual Basic .NET or C#. Default plugins included with the MapWindow download include:

• Shapefile Editor - For editing shape file geometry
• Grid Wizard - For importing and converting different grid data formats
• Attribute table Editor - For viewig and editing shapefile attribute table data
• Feature Identifier and Labeler - For identifying features and adding labels
• GIS Tools - For clipping, assigning projections and reprojecting raster and vector data

In addition to these, several existing plugins are available for download from the MapWindow downloads page.

There are many cases where it may be useful to write your own plugins. For example, you may want to write a plug-in to:

• Plot housing density by housing type based on a click on a particular neighborhood;
• Re-project data from one projection to another;
• Calculate the total upstream length of a stream network based on a selected stream;
• Simulate a battlefield with tanks, obstacles, and other interactive elements;
• Launch a web-browser with the company web site for each of the businesses in a town based on a selection of a building on a map;
• Compute and display land cover distribution within a selected region;
• etc…

If you are interested in writing MapWindow plugins for your own use, or for redistributing them to others, you should look at sample code and take a shot at it. You'll find that it is very easy to do and quite fun.

You have the copyright and licensing rights for any plug-in that you write. This means that you can sell your plugins if you would like. Regardless of how you choose to license your own code, we would be happy to add your plug-in to our plugins download page either directly, or as a link to your company or personal page.

Most of the plugins on the MapWindow download page include source code that you can use as a model when writing your own plugins. One of the best plugins to look at for a sample code reference is the Feature Identifier that is part of the MapWindow application source code download. This plug-in is a fairly complete example of working with both vector and raster data through a plug-in.

Draft documentation is available for download here on our documentation page.