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Hi.

What is the best way to come up a Mapping Service using WPF (vb.net), Expression Blend and SQL?

I will be creating a Tourist Kiosk, therefore there is an assigned place for it.

The system should present a Map and a list of Establishments in town. If an establishment is clicked, the Map will highlight the Establishment and the Kiosk and will present a dotted line in between the Establishment and the kiosk to represent the way.

Also, the system will indicate the distance (on how far) the establishment is from the kiosk.

What are the best solutions for this, in just using the said programs above?

Thanks in advance... :)
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Silvabolt 11-Jul-13 16:14pm    
Keep in mind that the traveler can't just walk in a single line between the kiosk to the establishment. Since you're in .net domain, your probably gonna wanna try out bing maps. Using the api you will have the maps, ability to put markers on the maps (which will be your highlighting feature), the map will be scaled already, there would be automatic path generation for shortest path between the kiosk to the establishment, and a lot of the dirty work will be done.

http://www.microsoft.com/maps/developers/web.aspx

If you have your own custom map that you want to use, that's probably gonna be a lot more work. In brief, you will need to place your map on the page with another section (dividing the screen) that lists establishments, every time a user clicks on the establishment, retrieve lat and long coordinates, and identify it on the map, trigger a response on the map by making say a label popup, and then you can draw a line objects to map out a path to follow. You'd need to do some kind of scaling to make sure the latitude and longitudes on your map are accurate and you would also need to figure out the algorithms for shortest paths.

In both cases, your SQL server needs to store the lat and long coordinates of the establishments and the kiosk itself. If you are doing your own map, you would probably need to store all the intersections between your establishments and kiosk as well.

I think it would be something like this, I've never actually worked with any map api directly so I'm not sure if I missed something.
hoyice 13-Jul-13 11:39am    
It is a small town, the people in town just walk the whole place. :)
hoyice 13-Jul-13 11:41am    
Am I going to use X and Y coordinates for this?
Silvabolt 11-Jul-13 16:21pm    
Here is a tutorial I found on bing maps, it uses some thing called WebMatrix to make a website, but the main thing is that you can get a quick glimpse of what you can do with it from the tutorial.

http://www.microsoft.com/web/post/using-the-bing-maps-api

Not sure about using Google Maps, because I'm pretty sure it isn't built for .net, though there are some 3rd party api extensions for it.
hoyice 13-Jul-13 11:38am    
Thank you Silva!!! That is exactly what I'm suppose to do. Out project is not connected in the internet, we cannot use google maps.

I guess, we'll be using custom map for this since our application is strictly offline.

My question now, is on how will start the project? After i draw the map and everything what will be the next step?

Should I turn the establishments into button?

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