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Showing posts from 2009

Silverlight 3 beta 1 and Virtual Earth part 2 (The Map)

In my previous post I covered getting GEO spatial data into SQL and creating a service Silverlight can use to get the data in a usable format. In this post we are going to talk about how to create a Silverlight application to overlay geo spatial data on the Virtual Earth map. First thing first. Download the Silverlight Virtual Earth map control. Once you have done that start a new Visual Studio 2008 Silverlight project and add a reference to the Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl and copy the following code into the XAML of your default window or page. < Grid x:Name ="LayoutRoot" Background ="White" > < m:Map Name ="MyMap" ZoomLevel ="4" Center ="39.36830,-95.27340" Grid . Row ="1" /> </ Grid > Make sure you add this namespace as well for the VE add-in xmlns:m= "clr-namespace:Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapCont

Silverlight 3 beta 1 and Virtual Earth part 1 (GEO Data)

I recently did some playing with Silverlight 3 beta 1 and the Virtual Earth (VE) CTP. I wanted to map out the congressional districts for Colorado on the VE map. It was a little tricky but not bad once I figured a few things out. First thing to figure out was where to get the geo mapping data to overlay on the VE CTP map. The site with a lot of this information is the U.S. Census web sites (you can find all the Congressional district data here ). I decided to download and work with the shape file (.shp). Once you have these downloaded the next trick is figuring out how to get this data into SQL Server 2008. The tool I used was Shape2SQL from SharpGIS. It works great and is pretty simple to use. There is also a CodePlex SQL Server spatial tools project that may have some helpful tools. Now that we have our spatial data imported into SQL we can start using it. The first thing to be aware of is that .Net 3.5 does not natively understand SQLGeometry types (seems silly but it is true

Silverlight 3 beta 1 Errors

I have been playing with Silver 3 beta 1 and ran into a couple errors that really stumped me for a bit. Here is how you fix them in case any one else runs into them as well. 1- Object reference not set when adding a Silverlight WCF service: This is caused by your source control settings. I solved this issues by going to Tools –> Options –> Source Control and changing it from TFS to None. No idea why this causes the error but it did solve the issue for me. 2- Unable to find ‘DynamicTypeService’ error. This one was a little more work. In this folder C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE you will find a file called “Microsoft.VisualStudio.ServicesProxy.dll” this file needs to be removed (I just changed the extension to .old) before installing the Silverlight 3 beta 1 VS tools (which installs the SDK and the runtime). I of course had already installed all this so I uninstalled it all, renamed the file and installed it again (the installed with install the abo

Sitecore – One man’s opinion

I recently spent about 6 months building a web site in Sitecore 5.3.2. As this was my first time using Sitecore I wanted to put down some thoughts I have about the platform. While there was definitely some very frustrating aspects to Sitecore there are also so very slick and cool things about it. While the install I was working on was version 5.3.2 I took a trip to San Francisco to get certified in version 6.0.  Learning Curve Sitecore is build on .Net, XPATH and heavy use of XSLTs. If you are familiar with these technologies the learning curve for Sitecore is not to bad. I had a development team of 5 developers offshore. The team was able to get up to speed on Sitecore in about a week. Really the trickiest part of Sitecore to learn is the administration UI and the use of templates, masters and standard values (these are all Sitecore objects). You really need to think through how you will use these objects. The UI The UI for Sitecore is pretty interesting. It is all browser bas