Map your Data – Part 10

In my last post, I mentioned that I might have some info on how to do client side mapping over Virtual Earth in Silverlight.  I’m pleased to inform you that I do indeed, thanks to Adam Eversole and Jared Bienz.

Adam had developed a prototype called VIEWS, and posted about its availability on an internal discussion list.  Jared and I quickly downloaded it and were impressed by what we saw, but Jared took it a step further and did some refactoring to make the API more managed code friendly.

The result is now available up on CodePlex at https://www.codeplex.com/views.  While this is not by any means a comprehensive, officially-sanctioned Microsoft-supported Silverlight wrapper for Virtual Earth, it’s an neat sample for those interested until such a thing arrives.

You should note that while nearly everything I’ve discussed will work for both WPF and Silverlight, you’ll need to proxy your SQL 2008 queries through a WCF endpoint (ADO.NET Dynamic Data or SSDS might be good choices for this – I’m actively experimenting with this now.)

My next step is to build a comprehensive demo of these techniques on both WPF and SL and then post them as samples.  It’ll take me a little while, but I expect to have them together soon.

Thanks, and please don’t hesitate to ping me if you have questions about any of this.  I’ll try to help as I can.