Dave Glover "Down Under (Oz)" : MapPoint

Coming to Melbourne soon! Microsoft Virtual Earth Platform and MapPoint Web Service - Meet the Experts

dglover — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:37:07 GMT

The Microsoft Virtual Earth team are holding an event on 31^stJuly 2008 in Melbourne office (level 5, 4 Freshwater Place, Melbourne) to provide you with all the information you require to integrate Virtual Earth into your business offering. Never before has it been so easy for companies to track assets, find customers, manage a mobile sales force & engineers or make sure customers find you before they find a competitor!

Gain real insight into how map-enabling business applications can help create customer satisfaction and an optimised organisation. If you are a technologist you'll be amazed at just how easy it is to access and integrate Virtual Earth into an existing environment. Developers should not miss this opportunity to hear from Johannes Kebeck, one of the world's leading experts on the Virtual Earth platform.

The agenda will consist of:

Informative sessions; you will hear from customers and partners who have utilised Virtual Earth as well as technical presentations and the latest updates from Virtual Earth.
A masterclass from Johannes Kebeck highlighting useful tips and tricks for developers, ensuring you get the most out of the Virtual Earth platform.
A valuable opportunity to network with other partners and developers as well as members of the Virtual Earth team.
The day will run from 11.30am until 5.30pm and we do hope you can join us.

Places are limited so if you do wish to register please do so asap click here to register

Cheers Dave

VDNUG Mobility Development with Visual Studio 2005 Session Links (Dec 13, 2005)

dglover — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 14:56:00 GMT

Well I hope you enjoyed my slot in the VDNUG meeting on building mobile apps with Visual Studio 2005. Here are the references I discussed...

www.msdn.com/mobile
Windows Mobile V5 SDK
Openwave emulator - check out their developer site for the SDK download (see http://asp.net/mobile/DeviceSimulators.aspx?tabindex=5 for more info on emulators)
http://www.opennetcf.org - Smart Devices Framework, almost required for Compact Framework V1 applications, much less so for Compact Framework V2

Demos and Sample code

ASP.NET V2 Mobile Web Forms - Web browser based adaptive/broad reach device application development.

Can be built with Full Visual Studio 2005 (and 2003) or Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition. Adaptive to most mobile phones in the market place, I can't find list of devices supported in ASP.NET V2, but check out what is supported in ASP.NET V1 here and you'll see that it's a comprehensive list of phones and emulators!!

Mobile Web Forms demo links

Mobile Web Mappoint:

Demo URL: http://tinyurl.com/bpevs
Source code: http://projectdistributor.net/Projects/Project.aspx?projectId=143
Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/mappoint/ for great info and possibilities around MapPoint

Hoff Piccie of the Day (lol, yes I know but a bit of a laugh, and you did...) it should work on pretty much any phone that can connect to the internet - let me know if it doesn't!! But basically to demonstrate the adaptive nature of the ASP.NET Mobile Web Forms Server Controls - notably the Calendar control.

Demo URL: http://tinyurl.com/7kmfd

Compact Framework - Targeting Windows Mobile Devices for Rich and Partially Connected Scenarios

Compact Framework Working Samples

SMSVoter Applicaton: Compact Framework V2+ and Windows Mobile V5 Devices. Demonstrates using SMS as an application data transport and notification mechanism. Also makes extensive use of SQL Server Mobile 2005. See http://projectdistributor.net/Projects/Project.aspx?projectId=152
Convert It: Demonstrates extensive use of XML and Web Services from a Smartphone running Compact Framework V1, see http://blogs.msdn.com/dglover/articles/481688.aspx

3rd Party Apps Used or spotted during demos

Pocket Controller Pro 5.04 - Used to project Smartphone and Pocket PC on to PC Display - see http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=1547
Egress RSS News Reader - see http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=12324

Also www.Pocketgear.com and www.Smartphone.net also have developer Zones, actually pretty cool for freeware and commercial applications!!

Mobile Web MapPoint is Magic Mate - Geez, now this stuff is cool!! See sample code...

dglover — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 12:17:00 GMT

Ok, I'll admit it, I've been putting off trying out MapPoint for quite some time but last week I had a "Mapping" customer opportunity so with the help of Andrew's Marvellous MapPoint Posting I dived in and I was amazed just how easy it was to get going with MapPoint.

You can build with Visual Studio 2003 or 2005.

If you go down the VS 2005 route then you need to be aware of an issue with the auto generated MapPoint Web Services Proxy - the MapPoint WSDL describes 4 services each with different end points but there is a bug in the VS 2005 Proxy generator and all the end points end up with the same URI. So check out Andrew's and Rob's work around before heading down the VS 2005 route - they are simple enough and will save you time and frustration...

I've put the code for this sample on Mr Neimke's most excellent Project Distributor site here, feel free to download it, it's licensed under the "Do what you want you with the code, no liability accepted, no guarantees" it's a sample ok and not a lot of code:-) You'll need to plug in your own MapPoint (free trail) account details in to the sample code, if you are a MSDN Subscriber then you can sign up for a trail account here.

The maps are optimised for your average mobile phone screen size and I've implemented getting a map, getting a route plus directions and zoom in and out capability.

For more MapPoint resources check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/mappoint/, you can download the MapPoint SDK from here, it does specify Visual Studio 2003, but it installs just fine on VS 2005, it doesn't show up in the Search Contents, but it's there, the SDK is documentation only, you can also view it online here.

For a limited time I'll have the sample app running on the web, tap http://tinyurl.com/9ksjm into your phone's browser or on ya PC, it's set up for Australian Maps but it will give you an idea how it works.

The app was built ASP.NET V2 App using the Mobile Web Forms/Controls, the only thing I did over and above using the controls out of the box was in the web.config file to set the session state to cookieless (<sessionState cookieless="true" regenerateExpiredSessionId="true" />) as I found that some phones and emulators (www.openwave.com) struggled with cookies.

The size of the maps returned are optimised for a mobile phone, enjoy and if you get a chance to try the app at http://tinyurl.com/9ksjm then leave me a comment against this post - good/bad/make-model of phone etc...

PS, you'll find developer info on the recently announced Virtual Earth off the main MapPoint site as well.