Skip to main content

Getting started with Silverlight and Bing Maps

I have a relatively new found love for Silverlight, and when I got the chance to create a demo with Silverlight and Bing Maps I got very excited. The application gets objects from an existing Web Service. The objects contains meta data and coordinates in the format SWEREF 99. On silverlight.net there are information on how to get started with Silverlight. In addition, this is what you need to do to get started with Silverlight and Bing Maps:
  1. Download and install Bing Maps Silverlight Control SDK.
  2. Create an account at Bing Maps Account Center to be able to create Bing Maps Keys.
In the Silverlight applicationen you only need to add a reference to Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.dll, and after that you are ready to use Bing Maps in Silverlight.

<UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication1.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
    xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    xmlns:bing="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl"
    mc:Ignorable="d">
    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
        <bing:Map CredentialsProvider="[BingMapCredentials]" Mode="Road" ZoomLevel="5" Center="61.71816218644379, 17.33600065112114">
            <bing:Pushpin Location="59.331959746778026, 18.062450140714645" />
        </bing:Map>
    </Grid>
</UserControl>

This basic example is a foundation to a lot of fun, but the first challenge for me was the coordinate transformation, which is about as tricky as it sounds. The objects contains coordinates in plain SWEREF 99 format while Bing Maps uses decimal WGS 84 format.

Luckliy I found an excellent .NET library, MightyLittleGeodesy by Björn Sållarp, which allows me to transform the coordinates between a wide range of formats.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Binding Enum with DescriptionAttribute in WPF

Binding an enumeration to a ComboBox can be done in several ways. In most cases you don't want to display the value itself, but a more user friendly description. One common approach is to use the DescriptionAttribute on the Enum values to supply a description for each value.  This is all possible in a very MVVM friendly way. First step is to add the  DescriptionAttribute  to the values of the enumeration. public enum MyValues { [Description("First value")] First, [Description("Second value")] Second } To retrieve the description from the enum we use a simple extension method. This method returns the value of the DescriptionAttribute if it exists, otherwise the string representation of the enum value is returned. public static string GetDescription(this Enum value) { var fieldInfo = value.GetType().GetField(value.ToString()); var attribute = fieldInfo.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DescriptionAttribute), false).FirstOrDefault() as ...
2 comments
Read more

Binding a HTML-formatted string to a WPF WebBrowser control

Sometimes there is a need to display a HTML formatted string in a WPF application. There are a couple of ways to do this, but the most stright forward is to use a WebBrowser control and the NavigateToString method. This approach has one big flaw, you cannot use binding to a string out of the box, but I found a great solution through Stack Overflow which adds a bindable property to the  WebBrowser  control using  NavigateToString . The following class is all that is needed to add that behavior. A new depencency property named Html is introduced to the  WebBrowser  and the proper change action is performed in the OnHtmlChanged method. public class BrowserBehavior { public static readonly DependencyProperty HtmlProperty = DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached( "Html", typeof(string), typeof(BrowserBehavior), new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(OnHtmlChanged)); [AttachedPropertyBrowsableForType(typeof(WebBrowser))] public static string GetHtml(...
1 comment
Read more

The Cornball goes to Brunch with Chaplin

Lately I've been working pretty hard on different projects but not really stumbling upon anything blogworthy. The most recent project is quite interesting though, a single page, touch friendly, web application using the latest and greatest technologies. We've ended up with using Brunch with Chaplin , which is a very neat way of setting up a Backbone based single page web project with Brunch and Chaplin . Aside from this, I have my own little project that has lived on for almost 15 years already, The Cornball . From being a plain Windows application written i C an Win32 API, it has been ported to .NET using WPF, and is currently a Silverlight application hosted on Windows Azure. I could not find a better time to reanimate this project and create a new web based version, touch friendly, super optimized, awesome in any way. So I did... So please follow my journey at Github . It's going to take a while, I assure you, but I already have some ground work done. Meanwhile,...
2 comments
Read more