There are other tools, but in the process of working on something else, I put together a command line tool for loading shapefiles into Sql Server 2008. It is modeled after PostGIS's shp2pgsql, except that it loads directly into the db instead of writing sql to stdout. Here is the usage:
shp2sqlserver.exe -h
Usage: shp2sqlserver.exe [OPTIONS]+ [...]
For various reasons, using OpenGL as a 2D map renderer did not work out as well as I thought it would. Particularly:
The performance was not good. I think this is because there is a lot of overhead in setting up (and possibly tearing down) the OpenGL environment. It really was made for [...]
Up until now, I have just done single 2D image rendering in Cumberland, but I went ahead and tried it in interactive 3D:
(ogg version)
Actually, it was quite easy as I just reused the code from Salmon Viewer.
I've started a new project. It's called cumberland. It's a map rendering framework for .Net which utilizes the frame buffer extension of OpenGL to render offscreen. The idea being that you can unlock the power of your video card to render maps.
To show it off, I wrote a quick little website for [...]