Foreword

It's not surprising that discovery has always been rooted in the art and science of mapping. Maps represent many complex relations and hordes of data, yet a child is intuitively able to navigate and comprehend them. Maps have long been the information windows through which explorers and others have peered to find answers. Maps tell the story of the past, record the present, and reveal the future.

Today is no different from the past in that most informationwhether business or personalhas a strong relational tie to the place where we reside. The real world provides a commonly understood framework for the endless fields of digital datawhether it lives on the Internet, your corporate network, your desktop, or your mobile device.

The conventional map is changing quickly into a digital representation of the real world. Traditional maps are quickly merging with immersive imagery, local content, 3-D models, and real world sensors. The digital map will have life through its vibrant contributing community of authors and experts that fulfill the dream of global access to local knowledge. Imagine a world where you pivot information in a highly visual place to discover what it's like somewhere else. Layers of informationwhether you seek the news, classifieds, weather, stores, restaurants, photos, local businesses, tourist attractions, sporting events, music venues, or recreational activitiesare easily discoverable. Your friends and colleagues share favorites and experiences among each other. The community adds pictures and content, corrects data and information, and provides currency and expertise in specialized knowledge until the map takes on a life of its own. If these concepts excite you, you share the passion of the Virtual Earth and MapPoint team.

For many years, unleashing the power of location technology within business or consumer applications was daunting. Geographic Information Systems were limited to companies with inelastic needs and ample resources. Developers were relinquished to niche departmental, non-mainstream applications due to the heavy lifting involved with data management, legacy proprietary GIS development environments, and the lack of an easy way to distribute mapping functionality. Deploying a simple real estate application to a national field sales team would have required a developer to distribute hundreds of megabytes of aging geographic data with desktop code only to have IT revisit this task frequently to update the application with new features or new street data. Web services provided developers with the first means to build broad, scalable, horizontal applications across the network. Web services abstract the developer from the intricacies of GIS and the anchor of large data sets and provide the developer with a means to update features and data quickly and inexpensively.

As a team set to build platforms for location-based application development, we embraced the change years ago with the first commercial SOAP/XML MapPoint Web Service and continue to lead the next charge with Virtual Earth. Virtual Earth, in conjunction with MapPoint Web Service, is both a platform and a user experience that revolutionizes the way users experience location information both online and offline. Given the simplicity of adding location technology to your application, the awesome user appeal of an immersive, well understood real-world user dimension, and the realization of significant business and user benefits, there is no better time to develop location technology and services.

Chandu Thota is an accomplished developer on the Microsoft Virtual Earth and MapPoint team, as well as an influence on much of the early thinking in the next wave of the Internet and mapping technologies. He knows firsthand the best way to develop applications in a quick and effective way using MapPoint technologies. In this book, he narrates a developer story about a platform that has been his work, play, and passion at Microsoft. Whether you are an enterprise developer or hobbyist programmer, Programming MapPoint in .NET will set you apart from other developers in the field.

Stephen Lawler

Unleash your application and data with the power of location,

General Manager, Virtual Earth and MapPoint