Tag Archives: OGDI

Open Government Data and Bing Map Apps

Leave a reply

The Bing Maps team is running a King of Bing Maps contest.  Chris Pendleton just published a blog post on Bing Map App Development Resources over on the Bing Maps blog.  If you aren’t familiar with Bing Map Apps, they are mini applications you write in Silverlight that become part of the Silverlight version of Bing Maps.

http://www.bing.com/maps/explore

You have to submit your app for approval.  Approved apps show up in the Map Apps gallery:

image

You bring up the Map Apps gallery by clicking the “MAP APPS” button in the left pane of the Bing Maps UI:

image

Map Apps are a great way to visualize open Government data that has the necessary location information. So far, I haven’t seen many map apps do this other than the Bing Health Maps application:

image

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that some of the apps submitted will use publicly available Government data as the source for Bing Map Apps.  Will you be the person to submit one and win?  I hope so.

Don’t know where to get publicly available Government data? You can find a few over on the producers page of http://odata.org as well as http://data.gov.  Most of the Government OData services on the producers page of http://odata.org use the OGDI starter kit created by my team.  If you are a Government organization that wants to make your data publicly available on the internet through an OData service, then OGDI is a great way to get started.

I’m speaking at FedScoop’s Roadmap to the Cloud Summit

Leave a reply
digg_url = “http://blogs.msdn.com/devkeydet/archive/2010/03/03/i-m-speaking-at-fedscoop-s-roadmap-to-the-cloud-summit.aspx”;digg_title = “I’m speaking at FedScoop’s Roadmap to the Cloud Summit”;digg_bgcolor = “#555555”;digg_skin = “normal”;http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.jsdigg_url = undefined;digg_title = undefined;digg_bgcolor = undefined;digg_skin = undefined;

My team is participating in FedScoop’s Roadmap to the Cloud – Presented by Microsoft on March 9th at the Ronald Reagan Building’s Pavilion room in Washington DC.  I’ll be presenting as part of the Developer Track.  My session is titled “Sharing Government Data through Windows Azure using OGDI & ‘Dallas’.”  My team is responsible for OGDI.  Come check out the event and dev track if you are interested Cloud Computing.  Full details here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/archive/2010/03/03/fedscoop-s-roadmap-to-the-cloud-summit-march-9-2010-register-today.aspx

Using code analysis again…

Leave a reply

This week marks my 5 year anniversary at Microsoft.  Five years ago, I stopped being a “real developer” and became an evangelist.  Ok, I started with a short stint as a SQL / BizTalk Technology Specialist (what other companies call “pre-sales engineer”), but I’ve pretty much been focused on developers the whole time.  I used FxCop back in my days of “real development.”  As an evangelist, I spend lots of time writing demo code and samples.  Today, I had a rude awakening that I’ve gotten a little sloppy.  I’ve used “it’s demo code” as an excuse so many times.  In many ways, I think it is a fair excuse.  However, I think I have leaned on that crutch a little too long. 

We are going through and cleaning up the OGDI codebase preparing it for CodePlex.  Part of our internal review is to use code analysis to help us identify refactoring opportunities.  Yea, Yea, Yea.  I know.  We should have been using it all along.

As part of preparing for our code review, I wanted to find out what else is available in the way of analysis tools that are free.  I also wanted to review the capabilities in Visual Studio 2008.  Here’s what I came across:

Writing Quality Code (various subsections on code analysis)

Code Analysis Team Blog

Code Analysis tools on MSDN Code Gallery

StyleCop Blog (Source Code Style and Consistency Tool)

StyleCop on MSDN Code Gallery

CAT.NET

I also watched this PDC session:

Improving Code Quality with Code Analysis

I’d definitely recommend checking out these resources and using the tools.  I hope to learn a lot from using these tools.  I also plan on forcing myself to use them as I build out demos, samples, and work on projects in the future.

Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI)

Leave a reply

I’ve been relatively quiet on the blog lately.  I’ve made hints in a couple posts that I’ve been working on a fun little Windows Azure project that has been consuming my time.  Well, I can finally talk about it a little more.  Keith, a manager on my team, blogged about OGDI on my team’s blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/archive/2009/05/07/microsoft-announces-the-open-government-data-initiative-ogdi.aspx

Check out the blog post.  I’ve had my hand in many parts of the OGDI codebase.  I plan on writing a series of posts explaining different parts of the OGDI code.  We are also planning a Developer Dinner in Reston, Va later this month that will focus on “how we built it.”

We will be making the entire source code for this solution available on CodePlex.  We’re currently going through code cleanup, review, etc.  The process for putting code up on CodePlex is a little more involved for Microsoft employees.  Rest assured we are working hard to get it up there!