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 SÃ¥llarp, which allows me to transform the coordinates between a wide range of formats.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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,...

Bindable RichTextBox with HTML conversion in WPF

In WPF , the RichTextBox  control is not really like other controls. Due to its flexible nature, there is no built in way of binding a property to the content. In this case, I wanted a simple  RichTextBox  control with a binding to an HTML formatted string to be able to use the built-in formatting features of the  RichTextBox  and allow users to create simple HTML formatted content. First, doing the conversion on-the-fly proved to have major performance issues, so I ended up binding the content to a XAML string. The XAML to HTML conversion can be performed at any time. I created a UserControl with a bindable Text-property. The view contains a  RichTextBox  control. <RichTextBox x:Name="richTextBox" TextChanged="OnRichTextBoxChanged"> The source code for the user control contains the Text property and the methods to handle the binding. public static readonly DependencyProperty TextProperty = DependencyProperty.Register( "Te...

Using ASP.NET MVC with MEF

I wrote this post almost a year ago, but never published it for some reason. Anyway, here is a little MVC/MEF magic. By default a controller in MVC must have a parameterless constructor. When using MEF a good practice is to inject the services via constructor parameters. These two in combination obviously creates an issue where the following scenario will not work out of the box, since there is no parameterless constructor for  MVC  to use. Note that the PartCreationPolicy is set to NonShared since a new controller have to be initialized for each request. [Export] [PartCreationPolicy(CreationPolicy.NonShared)] public class HomeController : Controller {     private readonly IServiceClient _service;     [ImportingConstructor]     public HomeController(IServiceClient service)     {         _service = service;     }     public ActionResult Index()     {         ...