Preface

Location is everything! Whether you are trying to find driving directions to the airport or looking for a good restaurant in town, location information has become an essential ingredient of our daily life. Enterprises today consider providing location-based services to their customers an important part of their service offerings. Using MapPoint products and services, you can answer questions such as:

• Where am I?

• How do I get from here to there?

• Where is the nearest coffee shop?

Whether you want to answer these questions using an online application, a web service, or a mobile phone in real-time, or offline, this book is for you. MapPoint provides an integrated set of products, servers, and services that helps enterprises improve their customers' experience by applying mapping and location.

If you are looking for more programming resources on MapPoint 2004, MP2K Magazine provides excellent online resources and the most up-to-date technical articles on MapPoint 2004 programming. Check it out at http://www.mp2kmag.com.