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Showing posts from July, 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