What is the best route or place to get started with ArcObjects if one is not a developer and not aiming to become a developer?
I've been using gis professionally for a long time, almost two decades, arcinfo/arcgis for most of that; I'm pretty good. I'm learning software development, and even have a modestly successful small python application used in a public project; I'm not good! I don't want to become a full fledged software developer but I keep running into things I just can't do without programming (example). In the arcgis world this puts me pretty squarely in the python camp, which is fine by me since I like python, however python does not have straightforward access to ArcObjects. (Python and ArcObjects is possible, but it's an unsupported route. This question is about following a beaten path.)
I need to get started, but where? Arcgis help says to get started with the ESRI Developer Network but $1500/yr is definitely not in my budget, and sounds like using a sledge hammer to swat mosquitos. And which language .NET, Visual Basic, or Visual C++?
UPDATE: Thank you everyone for the wonderful answers. In light of them I realise I unecessarily narrowed the scope of my question be pre-supposing "ArcObjects" is the direction I need to go in. A more open ended formulation is more along the lines of:
I keep running into problems I just can't solve with arcgis and python alone. What else can I learn/use to solve problems like X? I've no interest or intention of becoming a software developer. I just need to do a couple things which aren't exposed to the arcgis python modules.
Answer
VB.Net Add-Ins for sure. The ESRI walk-troughs will get you on the way.
I've been using VB6 and VBA for years and personally I find VB fairly intuitive. Of course VB .Net is an entirely different animal but the add-in structure is relatively simple to learn and deploy. I just took a technical workshop in ArcPy at an ESRI conference and I have to say that I will be sticking with the VB.Net add-ins. I was crying rivers when it become apparent that VBA will be replaced by add-ins but after breaching the learning curve I must say that it is the single best improvement to ArcGIS 10. There is nothing I cannot do with this setup. I have custom tools all over the place. The things people complain about in ArcGIS I simply customize to my liking. Writing a tool and distributing it in an office environment is a breeze...
All you need is the free Visual Studio Express and the SDK installed.
Here is the walk-trough: http://help.arcgis.com/en/sdk/10.0/arcobjects_net/conceptualhelp/index.html#/Building_add_ins_for_ArcGIS_Desktop/0001000000w2000000/
As for ArcObjects, there are so many examples and code snippets that you can add directly into Visual Studio that you might just be able to learn the basics from the examples.
In version 8 ESRI actually published ArcObjects books; 2 huge volumes that were a great reference and included many examples for C and VB. All can now be found online but I wish ESRI would again publish these.
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