Ray Rischpater

Power Map for Excel

While we enjoy programming, we feel there’s something to be said for solving a problem without needing to code; after all, no code means no bugs, right? With Power Map, a plug-in for Microsoft Excel Professional and Office 365 Professional, you can create clear geospatial visualizations of your data right from Excel. In many cases involving data visualization, Power Map eliminates the need for programming altogether, letting you work directly with your data in a spreadsheet and see relationships right on a map. Even as a debugging tool, this can be very helpful—you can take a slice of your data from a database, import it into Excel, visualize it, and draw conclusions without needing to write code to plot data on a map.

Bing Maps for WPF

Web applications are well and good, but not every application is well suited to being a web application. Sometimes, what’s called for is a plain, old-fashioned, double-clickable executable, because of either business or feature constraints. Location-enabling a .NET application isn’t any more difficult than adding a Bing Maps assembly and control; in this chapter and the next, we will show you how to do this — first for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) here and then for Windows Universal applications in the following chapter.

Map Visualization with Bing Maps for the Web

We are now finally able to begin your first Bing Maps application with all the pieces you made in the previous chapters! In this chapter, you will learn how to visualize the earthquake data we collected in Chapter 3, using the WCF data service developed in Chapter 4 on the Azure-hosted, web-based Bing map created in Chapter 2.

Doing More with Bing Maps

So you have now learned to build your first Bing Maps web application. You can display geodata on a Bing map using pushpins. You even learned how to draw some basic geometric shapes. Now it’s time for the fun stuff! Bing Maps can go so much further than the basic application we showed you in Chapter 5. Using Bing Maps REST (Representational State Transfer) Services, you’ll be able to calculate routes between waypoints, or query for traffic incidents and much more. The Bing Maps REST Services API consists of the following APIs:

Getting Started with Microsoft and Mapping

Location and mapping play an increasingly important role in software today. The advent of location-aware social applications; websites like Bing Maps, Google Maps, and Yelp; mobile mapping and navigation applications; and location-aware games like Shadow Cities by Grey Area have all increased customer demand for software that knows, presents, and uses your location in helpful ways.

Geospatial Data with Azure SQL Database

In this chapter, we will give you a brief overview of Azure’s SQL Database and how it can be used to host your geospatial data. We will then present a sample application that takes the geospatial earthquake data from http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/ and stores it on the SQL Database.

Painless Hosting with Azure

In this chapter we will show you how to host a simple application that displays a Bing Map on Microsoft Azure (formerly Windows Azure), Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform. Cloud computing provides agile IT for businesses and developers. If a business wanted to deploy a new web application, the traditional method of deployment would require that the business set up the necessary hardware, software, operations, and support team in order to host this application on premises. With cloud computing, all of the infrastructure needed to deploy that application would already be available on the cloud, thereby reducing the necessary setup time and money required to deploy.

Using Bing Maps REST Services

In addition to the high-level components for building geospatially-aware applications we’ve described throughout this book, Microsoft provides lower-level building blocks for a lot of their services as representational state transfer (REST) services. Using the Bing Maps REST services, you can

Bing Maps for Windows Universal Applications

In Windows 10, Microsoft has introduced Windows Universal applications, which function on any platform running Windows 10, including desktops and tablets, as well as Windows Phones and Xbox One. By writing a Windows Universal application, you can target every platform running Windows 10—and there are a lot of them! As part of the Windows 10 platform, Microsoft includes a map feature that supports all the use cases you’ve come to expect, and a few more besides.

Hosting WCF Services on Microsoft Azure

In Chapter 3, we showed you how to import your geospatial data into an Azure SQL Database. In this chapter, we will show you how to create and host WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) Services on Microsoft Azure that will serve your geospatial data to a client application. In the following section, we will give you a quick crash course about WCF. For a deeper understanding of it, we recommend a dedicated WCF book, such as Pro WCF4: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation by Nishith Pathak.