Awkward Coder

Carrying on my series about the Criterion Factory in the WP7Contrib I thought I'd show the how we do a route search. We support multiple Criterion Factory methods for creating criterion these all depend on how much information you have available. Calculating a route using Bing Maps REST API can be tricky and confusing there are over 10 optional parameters which you could configure to get a route between 2 locations. As with other sets of method on the Criterion Factory we've attempt to reduce the complexity by providing this abstraction. Shown below are the methods on the Criterion Factory (for route search). As you can see all of the overloaded methods are rooted to final method which validates the Waypoints parameter. These are used like all other Criterion Factory methods to make creating criterion easier for use with the Bing Maps Wrapper service. #region CreateRouteSearch public static IRouteSearchCriterion CreateRouteSearch ( IList < WayPoint > wayPo...

Rich & I have been working on app which makes heavy use of geo-location information provided by the GeoCoordinateWatcher class on the WP7 platform. As the documentation on MSDN states this class exposes the Windows Phone location services. The GeoCoordinateWatcher class implements the INotifyPropertyChanged interface and all the events generated will be fired on the UI thread allowing you to easily bind the class to the UI, but as we already knew this is not always a good idea - for a detailed reason why this can be a bad idea check out this post by Jaime Rodriguez. What we also discovered is that you can't always trust the first position event generated by this class. We have a requirement to get the current location when a user clicks a button, the user could do this at any time when using the application - they could click once, a dozen times or not at all. Every time they click the button we need to get an accurate single value . The accuracy of the value ...

part2 -  http://awkwardcoder.blogspot.com/2011/10/how-many-pins-can-bing-maps-handle-in.html part3 -  http://awkwardcoder.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-many-pins-can-bing-maps-handle-in.html Rich & I've been working on a WP7 app recently which annotates the Bing Maps control with push pins. These pins represent a point of interest - a reported crime. We've been using the UK crime stats which are provided free of charge, all you have to do is register for an account here . They expose the data using a RESTful service which exposes the data as JSON over HTTP GET requests. It was relatively easy to build a service layer to consume and map this data into a set of model classes for binding to a UI. The RESTful service has multiple endpoints, some are designed to build complex queries spanning multiple HTTP requests and others are single requests based around your current location. The later is what I'll be using for this post. The API I'm using is the 'street-le...

Following on from my previous post Rich  & I are developing an app which has 2 versions - one has only a single sqlite database but the other could use multiple sqlite databases to store the data - in effect the data is partitioned (sharded) alphabetically for the second version. Our existing code used for the single database version uses a  Simple ORM  to do our data access. The primary reason being the code is 2 lines and importantly the performance cost of using the Simple ORM is not an issue at the moment. If it ever becomes an issue we'll switch it out. What follows is how we approached attaching multiple databases together. Sqlite allows multiple databases to be used under the same connection. The databases don't have to share the same schema at all, all that is required to use the attached databases is to use the syntax  database-name.table-name.  More info can be found at the sqlite.org website here . The first attempt...