One overlooked feature that is coming in ArcGIS Server 10

At the ESRI devsummit last week, there were a lot of new features in ArcGIS Server (AGS) version 10 that were getting a lot of attention. There was a lot of fan-dare around geodatabase editing over the web with the new Feature Service in AGS 10 and the flashy demos with all the new RIA clients for editing with the REST API. There are also a lot of articles & blog posts that have been written to cover those features in details. So, I thought I would stay off the beaten path and direct your attention towards a new feature in AGS 10 that is getting little to no attention. That new feature in AGS v10 is support for exporting PNG32 (32 bit PNG) map images from the REST API and other APIs offered by AGS. This should provide the complete support 8-bit transparency in PNGs and should help us avoid issues like the ones here. Printing maps functionality should also benefit from this new feature both in terms of quality and to avoid transparency issues when layering images.

Just check out the ‘Image Format’ drop-down here for proof of 32 bit PNG support . And as you can see here, AGS 9.3.1 only supported PNG24. Hope that helps someone… 🙂