Last night I was, just for fun, fooling around with creating my own mapserver engine using native .NET and GDI+ methods, combined with a PostGreSQL/PostGIS database. Until now I got Points, Labels and Line layertypes implemented.
I didn’t expect much of the speed, but it turned out that GDI+’s drawing methods and anti-aliasing rendering combined with .NETs automatic connection pooling provided me with an ultra fast map render engine. And just by exposing LineStyles as System.Drawing.Pen you get a vast amount of options for customizing the look of the rendered output. And it even looks great! I’m all ecstatic about the result, and will probably follow this further with more geometry types and additional data-providers (shapefile, Oracle etc). I’ll post some results here later.
