Map your data - Part 1
Over the past year, I've been doing lots of work using WPF and Silverlight to plot data on maps, and of late, I've had the good fortune to tap into the power of SQL 2008's geospatial capabilities to enhance my applications. As I think these experiences are of general interest to ISVs, I'm going to blog about them. As I'll be going into technical detail, I'll provide digest summaries here with pointers off to detailed entries + code on my personal blog. Let me begin by providing the general premise of what I'm trying to achieve...
Smart clients provide a great opportunity to bulid dynamic mapping applications without pounding on the server every time the data changes. Don't get me wrong - having the server render maps+data is quite powerful and useful.
However, adding WPF and/or Silverlight provides freedom of design for how those data are presented, provided that you can properly locate data points on the image generated by the server (I'll show you how..) Adding SQL Server 2008 allows you to get answers to complex geographic questions about your data (I'll show you how to do this too..) Putting all this together makes for some nice application possibilities.
As there are already many good sources of info about WPF, Silverlight, and SQL 2008 Geospatial functionality, I'm not going to repeat that info here. Instead, I'm going to presume that you know WPF, Silverlight, XAML, and the basics of SQL 2008 spatial data. In my next posting, I'll begin by showing you how to use a piece of client side code to plot points accurately on a map in both WPF and SL. In the meantime, I hope I've piqued your interest in this topic.
