Reimers.dk

Map Project User Contributions

jjrdk — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:04:00 GMT

This post has been some time underway, but I have finally been able to publish some community contributions to the Google Map .NET Control project.

Lachlan McCabe has contributed a small change to the GoogleMap class which lets users with an Enterprise license to specify their ClientID. When the ClientID is set the rendered code will request the map with the ClientID specified. If you don't have an enterprise license, then you don't need to set the ClientID property.

CapnChaos has contributed a nice implementation of the labeled marker project by Pamela Fox. The code is in the Reimers.Map.Extensions.LabeledIcon class. The labelled icon is different from the ordinary GoogleIcon class in that you can specify custom text to display on the icon. This means you have to do less image generation as the icon is dynamically generated on the client.

To facilitate other contributions and integration into your application, and testing, the control will be changing to using interfaces where possible. The interfaces will be placed in the Reimers.Code assembly. While this does create an extra dependency, it should make it easier to integrate code from other frameworks. The Reimers.Core namespace is obviously the best choice for defining interfaces across applications. This should preferably have been done through some standard. But given the likelihood that Bing and Google will agree on a common code standard, this seems the best working solution at present.

Finally I should also give a big thanks to all the people who report bugs in the forum. Even if I don't reply to them instantly they are noted and integrated into the code as quickly as possible, and checked in to svn://svn.reimers.dk/

Starting XMPP with .NET

jjrdk — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:11:00 GMT

If you haven't heard about XMPP before then I suggest that you find out what it is. In short, it's the protocol that Google Talk uses. But XMPP is so much more, and if you want to integrate real-time communication in your application, for example for multi-user collaboration, like Google Wave, then XMPP is a good option. This post is about the newly added XMPP support to the Reimers.dll which will let you get started adding collaboration support to your application....(read more)

Displaying Additional Information With Your Silverlight Overlays

jjrdk — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 13:31:00 GMT

Plotting a marker on your map is good for making your users aware that there is something worth noting at a certain geographic location. But even with Silverlight there is a limit to what you can reasonably display at the top level. The InfoContent is an attached property defined by the OverlayManager (Reimers.Silverlight.Bing.OverlayManager). It takes a UIElement, which is what will be displayed when the overlay is clicked. You set the InfoContent attached property like you would any other attached property, either in XAML or in code....(read more)

Using the OverlayManager

jjrdk — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:32:00 GMT

The OverlayManager (Reimers.Silverlight.Bing.OverlayManager) is intended to facilitate displaying overlays on the Bing Maps Silverlight control. The map control is very good for displaying map imagery, but in my opinion it gives you too much flexibility when it comes to displaying overlays. Let's face it, there's so much you can do in the Silverlight world, that it's easy to get overwhelmed. The OverlayManager is intended to help you perform common tasks when it comes to displaying overlays on a map....(read more)

Google Maps for Silverlight

jjrdk — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:04:00 GMT

The title is not exactly correct if you had expected the cool DeepZoom maps with Google's imagery. Now you know :-)

What I am talking is a Silverlight control to display map images from Google's Static Map API. This means that you can display map imagery in your Silverlight application, and because it's Silverlight, you can use it in your list boxes or whereever you want.

The StaticMap control supports all the features of the Static Map API v2, which means you can display overlays and many different image types. You can define all the properties directly in XAML or you can bind them to other values in your application.

So if you don't need all the flash of DeepZoom maps, but need to display some geographic data, then this is what you are looking for.

XAML

Currently it is available in the SVN trunk, but it will be included in the next release of the Reimers.Silverlight assembly.

Reimers.Silverlight Updated to Silverlight 3 RTW

jjrdk — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:04:00 GMT

The Reimers.Silverlight assembly has been recompiled against Silverlight 3 RTW. This means you can start using it in your Silverlight 3 applications.

What's new? If you haven't been following the posts on this blog, then here is a short list:

The Google AJAX Search API has been integrated into the assembly allowing you to perform clientside requests.
The Google Translation API is integrated as well.
The OverlayManager has been expanded to support clustering and time filtering for your map overlays.
Possibility to redraw lines and shapes by dragging vertices.
A range slider control has been added to allow you to select a range in a GUI.

Consuming REST Services from Silverlight

jjrdk — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:03:00 GMT

Silverlight has a relatively advanced network stack which allows you to perform GET and POST requests to both the same domain or other domains, provided they expose a cross-domain policy (crossdomain.xml or clientaccesspolicy.xml). With Silverlight 3 it is possible to perform other request types, such as PUT and UPDATE....(read more)

Clustering Overlays in Silverlight

jjrdk — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:27:00 GMT

One of the cool things about map applications in Silverlight is that they don't have the same limits on the amount of overlays it can display as HTML based maps have. This means that you can easily display 1000+ overlays without any noticeable degradation in performance. But just because your Silverlight map can handle it doesn't mean that your users can maintain their overview if you flood them with markers. This is where clustering comes. A cluster allows you to display a marker to represent a bunch of others, and when the cluster marker is clicked the contained markers are displayed....(read more)

4D Maps with Silverlight

jjrdk — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:12:00 GMT

By using the TimeRange attached property defined by the OverlayManager, map overlays can now be given information about their temporal context. This opens up a lot of interesting opportunities for displaying map data that changes with time with very few lines of code....(read more)

GUI Editing of Polygons and Polylines in Silverlight

jjrdk — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:42:00 GMT

The OverlayManager now enables you to make polygons and polylines editable directly in the map GUI. The EnableEditing method creates draggable markers on the map on each of the shapes vertices which allow you to update the position. Furthermore extra vertices can be added simply by clicking the polyline or polygon border....(read more)

Using the OverlayManager with Silverlight Maps

jjrdk — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:00:00 GMT

The OverlayManager hooks itself on to a map from the Silverlight map control and handles how overlays are displayed on the map so you don't have to worry about setting the attached properties. It also adds KML support, so you can import and export your overlays to KML for easy standards compliant data exchange....(read more)

Moving to Silverlight Maps

jjrdk — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 17:39:00 GMT

The first beta of the Reimers.Silverlight library has been posted to the site. The assembly allows reading and writing of KML files directly in Silverlight. It is designed to work with the Silverlight map control from Microsoft. It also contains a utility class to facilitate overlay handling on the map. In order to support map application, the assembly also adds access to the Reimers.dk AtlasService which allows geocoding and routing operations....(read more)

What Comes After 10000?

jjrdk — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:55:00 GMT

After 10000 downloads it has become time to reflect on where to go with the Google Maps .NET Control. Google has come out with version 3 of their map API, but Microsoft has developed a Silverlight map control. Which one to choose. Silverlight as a platform offers possibilities that are not available for traditional HTML based web application. But since developing map applications there is more of a gap when it comes to supplying data for applications....(read more)

Added Google Analytics Reader for .NET

jjrdk — Sat, 09 May 2009 11:59:00 GMT

I found out yesterday that Google recently launched an Analytics API. That is a very welcome to their APIs. But I was surprised to find that .NET developers were left to create their own HTTP requests and parse the results. I'm not going to go into any conspiracy theories here, but they managed to support Java, so why not .NET? Well if Google won't support .NET, then I will :-)...(read more)

ExternalCallback Example

jjrdk — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:26:00 GMT

The GoogleMap class includes the ExternalCallback event, which is intended as an alternative way to pass map related data to be processed on the server using callbacks. The GoogleMap class also includes a helper method called CreateMapCallback, which will generate the necessary JavaScript to allow you to use the external callback feature. Since it is standard JavaScript, it can be applied to any DOM event or any JavaScript function....(read more)

Deep Earth

jjrdk — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:15:00 GMT

Previously I wrote about creating a Silverlight control for Google Maps. Sadly Google wasn't up for supporting such a project, and still only allow you to access their map tiles through their API. Well, just shows that you get what you pay for :-) Looking around on the internet, I quickly found the DeepEarth projects on Codeplex. The project rocks. It supports lots of different map providers: Virtual Earth, OpenStreetMaps, WMS maps, etc, with all the rich animation of Silverlight....(read more)

Translate Resource Files

jjrdk — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:24:00 GMT

A practical sample of how to use the Google Translator from the Google AJAX API Wrapper example to check if your UI properly supports localization. The console application takes a file location of the resource file to translate as the only argument and will write the translated resource files to the same folder....(read more)

Version 4.1 Works With WCF

jjrdk — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:16:00 GMT

The latest update has a large code change to make it compatible with WCF services. The previous state serialization was changed to provide compatibility. The WCF compatibility has made it possible for DNNHost to provide webservice access to hosted geographic data....(read more)

Ensuring Valid SqlGeography Objects

jjrdk — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:33:00 GMT

Yesterday I wrote a post about the release of a project that can convert shapefiles and KML files to SqlGeography objects for use in a SQL Server 2008 spatial database. This post shows how you can validate SqlGeography objects in code. The SqlSpatial project has been updated with the validation code, as recommended by k.van.daalen....(read more)

SQL Server 2008, KML and Shapefiles

jjrdk — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:47:00 GMT

This weekend I had a look at SQL Server 2008 to find out about the new spatial functions and types that it includes. It has taken some time for Microsoft to include spatial capabilities, but it is here now, and it looks great. However there is no way to work with KML files. So I uploaded the source code to let developers read KML files and Shapefiles into a SQL Server 2008 as SqlGeography objects....(read more)

Version 4 Released

jjrdk — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:33:00 GMT

It took a bit longer than I would have wanted, but now version 4 is out. So why the new version number? When version 3 was launched there was a change to the object model so that it would closely mirror the underlying JavaScript API (Google's Maps API). Since the release of version 3.0 the control has undergone some tremendous changes as Google has continued to develop their service, new overlay types, new geocoding services, etc. So for that reason alone a new version seemed justified. But as with all version numbering, it's down to a subjective decision as to what constitutes a new version. The reason that this release is a new version is because of the ability to define maps using only markup. This is a major change in the way maps are set up on the page, so it felt right to call it a new version....(read more)

Version 4 Beta

jjrdk — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:49:00 GMT

The new version for the new year offers map definition using markup alone. No code behind necessary, but with complete Intellisense. This should make it easier for beginners to get started with map applications. Currently version 4 is only available through SVN....(read more)

Focus on the User

jjrdk — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:57:00 GMT

The new version includes several fixes to the geocoding deserialization. The geocode and reverse geocode methods now allow you to specify the language of the response by passing a CultureInfo parameter. Finally, the GoogleMap class can be centered on the user's location by setting the CenterOnUserLocation property to true....(read more)

An Example Using UpdatePanels and Google Maps.

jjrdk — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:57:00 GMT

There have been many users who have asked how to make Google Maps work in their ASP.NET AJAX application. Most people tend to assume that if you put your whole page in an UpdatePanel then it will give you instant AJAX functionality. While this is true as far as ASP.NET functionality goes (the postback model). But the minute you make more complex clientside applications (like Google Maps) the UpdatePanel comes up short. Rob from GIS4Business Ltd has created an example that shows how to interact with a map using UpdatePanels only on certain parts of the page....(read more)

Where Am I And How Do I Get There

jjrdk — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 08:29:00 GMT

The latest release focuses on the developments in Google's geocoding services. The control now includes support for both reverse geocoding and directions. Directions are exposed through the new GoogleDirections class that supersedes the previous construct and gives you full control over how you present your route information. Finally JSON serialization is supported directly for the classes, so you won't need proxy classes when serializing in your script services....(read more)