Welcome to the Map Suite™ Source Kit from ThinkGeo, a library that includes most of the source code from Map Suite Core. This gives you direct access to the classes that we created in our framework. The purpose of this guide is to show you how to access the source code contained within, so that you can refer to it during the course of developing your own GIS applications.

After installing the Map Suite Source Kit, you will see a new “Map Suite Source Kit” folder in your Windows Start Menu. Within this folder there are two Visual Studio solutions, one for Visual Studio 2008 and the other for Visual Studio 2010.

To get started, simply open either of these solutions – choose the one corresponding to the version of Visual Studio that you have installed. The Source Kit project will be opened, and within it, you can find source code for most of the classes in Map Suite Core. Each class is renamed with a prefix of “Custom”, which makes it distinctive from the original classes in order to avoid confusion.

The Source Kit project cannot be compiled right out of the box. As a result, you'll need to reference a released version of “MapSuiteCore.dll”, which includes the base classes of most “custom” classes in this project, as well as its dependencies. Once you have done that, you can run and debug the Map Suite Core source code contained in this kit.