Jacob Reimers Weblog

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)