Getting into ESRI ArcGIS Add-in Development in .Net and ArcObjects

Recently, I landed into a project for ArcGIS/ArcMap Desktop add-in development using ArcObjects in C#. I am a newbie in both ArcObjects and add-in development. Googling through I got tons of snippets on the ArcMap add-in development, but I was not familiar with tailoring them to make a working application.

Then, I started to look after Youtube and Amazon to see if any good basic books or tutorials that gives me basic concepts on tailoring the  ArcObjects/.Net snippets. On youtube, I came across a video tutorials series on “.Net programming with ArcOjects”, an excellent tutorial on ArcObjects and .Net development with sample Gis data and codes to download  by Hussein Nasser. I watched all 15 episodes on add-in development using VB.Net.

From the Amazon, I bought a book entitled, “Beginning ArcGIS for Desktop Development using .NET ” by Pouria Amirian, with a blind believe on the reviewers, but it turned out the 

The book is wonderful! The author does an excellent job of explaining basic .NET concepts and tying them into ArcObjects.This book was long overdue and it seems like the author really took his time to ensure the content was organized in a logical way and concepts are thoroughly explained.

I would recommend this book and Youtube video to anyone who is interested in learning ArcObjects in .NET. The both author includes .NET code samples as well as the solutions in C#/VB. Lots of useful stuff in there and I think when you finished you will have a good starting point to ArcGIS Desktop development.

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US address correction, address verification, and geocoding using ZP4, Google Geocoding API, and Bing Maps API

From a couple of months, I have been involved in Tax certificate address verification project for educational purpose; I have around 8 million parcel address  collected and maintained by different tax collecting agencies in various format for instance COBOL ,CSV, ASCII, Excel , and some are even in pdf for their tax districts. 

My task was to find the address from those different files and export them in CSV with corrected standard USPS address format (STREET, CITY, STATE, and ZIP) to make Universal Tax File format for data analysis by removing unwanted data from the address rows.  Initially, I used ZP4 software, it has “official United States Postal Service data files on a single DVD-ROM that provides a powerful tool for automatically determining the correct mailing address, ZIP + 4 code, and mail carrier route number for any location in the United States”, works fine for few address (about 15%) which has proper USPS standard address format. The real challenge starts with remaining   85% of the parcel address that has no USPS standard address format (either address without city and zip information or the vacant parcel lots that cannot accept mails and therefore not entered in the USPS mailing address database).

Looking around the Web, Google leaves me with tons of pages entitled on address correction and validation including close source and open source software APIs, tools, and datasets, but hard to figure out which method works for my project in terms of address quality(address was poorly written), quantity(8 million addresses), and resources (cheap and easy to implement) . After spending few days here and there, finally I come up with a solution that works for me, an integrated address correction strategy using ZP4, Google Geocoding API, and Bing Maps API.

Here, I am going to share how ZP4, Google and Bing integration makes my job easy and relatively cheap to validate and correct US physical street addresses.

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