Awkward Coder

In my previous post  I showed how to tessellate polygons over Bing Maps control. This was a demonstration of how to achieving tessellation over the map control for a WP7 app. The problem is this is a sub-optimal solution from a UI perspective. This post shows how I've changed to code to use an asynchronous pattern for creating the polygons. The code is available for download. The primary problem with the solution is not the actual calculation but ' where ' the calculation was being performed. All the work was done on the main UI (Dispatcher) thread. Simply this means the app would freeze whilst calculating the required the polygons for the currently visible map area. The secondary problem was overloading the UI thread with rendering requests. Obviously all the visible polygons need rendering to the screen, but if you chuck a lot of work at the UI thread nothing else in your app is going to be able to do any UI work until all those requests have been processed. T...

Before I complete the ' How many pins can Bing Maps handle in a WP7 app... ' set of posts . I want to take one last diversion and show how you can tessellate shapes on top of the Bing Maps control in a WP7 app. This builds on top of a previous post about drawing shapes on top of Bing Maps. If you're unsure what tessellation is, then the following definition should give you a good idea: A tessellation is created when a shape is repeated over and over again covering a plane without any gaps or overlaps. Only three regular polygons tessellate in the Euclidean plane: triangles, squares or hexagons. Shown below are some graphical examples of how these shapes tessellate: I'm only going to show how you can tessellate these shapes on top of the map control. The effect will be rendered as a set of MapPolygon class instances. You could achieve a similar effect with a set of MapPolyline class instances and it would be probably a lot easier but, and it is an imp...