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Acknowledgments

Thanks to O'Reilly for signing this book. I'd also like to thank my editor, Simon St.Laurent, for being patient with me and providing words of encouragement throughout the process.

Thanks to the MapPoint team for creating a fantastic set of products to write about!

Thanks to Wayne S. Freeze, Michael Schmalz, and Dylan Vance for serving as the technical reviewers for this book. All of them caught numerous oversights and mistakes and made the book much better as a result. I'd like especially to thank Dylan's thoughtful and thorough feedback.

I would like to thank Stephen Lawler for writing the foreword and laying out the vision for the future of MapPoint Development Platform for this book. I also would like to extend my special thanks to Anurag Sharma and Jay Nanduri for their encouragement and cooperation throughout this effort.

Writing a book is a collective effort and it was simply not possible to finish this project without help from the following people: Amit Dekate, Andrew Hwangbo, Brian Jepson, Caleb Thompson, Chris Pendleton, David Buerer, Eric Frost, Norm Bryar, Rachel Falzone, Richard Waymire, Stuart Macrae, and Steve Lombardi.

Finally, I would like to thank to my wife, Taarinya, for putting up with me when I essentially ignored the world writing this book through many weeks, long weekends, and late nights.

Chapter 1. Hello, MapPoint!

So, you want to develop location-based applications using .NET! Microsoft MapPoint technologies offer a wide variety of applications, services, and tools to enable you to develop powerful location-based applications using .NET technologies.

In this introductory chapter, I will go through different location-based application categories and architectures and explain which MapPoint product or technology is appropriate to use in certain scenarios; specifically , I will discuss the fundamental differences between the following three products and technologies from MapPoint:

• MapPoint 2004

• MapPoint Web Service

• MapPoint Location Server