MSDN Magazine - January 2009 - (Page 88)

WindoWs Mobile Use GPS And Web Maps For Location-Aware Apps Christopher Mitchell i recently moved to a new house, and some kind friends spent a full day helping me pack and unpack boxes, arrange for utility hookups, and all of the other important but tedious tasks of moving. On my way back from retrieving the last box at the old house, I nearly forgot to pick up dinner for my friends. I had set a reminder on my Windows Mobile phone, but it couldn’t tell me when I was driving right past the most convenient take-out restaurant. The solution I needed was a phone that informed me when I was near a place where I could complete said task. A time and locationappropriate reminder would have had us enjoying take-out rather than driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood after a long day of shifting boxes. This article discusses: • MapPoint Web services • Caching tasks and maps • Getting nearby points of interest • Creating new tasks Windows Mobile provides many interfaces and capabilities that can help keep the device informed about its environment—where it is, whether it has a signal, how much of a signal, and so on. But how can these features be used in your applications? The most prominent and arguably useful of these capabilities is location awareness. This should enable you to create location-aware applications, ranging from the rather obvious satellite navigation program to the much more sophisticated task list that will be discussed here. This article will look at the issues involved with using this capability and the additional code you need to write to develop useful applications. In this article, I will discuss the mobile application development environment and utilities, and show you how to build a location-aware task list application that can remind you of a task when and where it’s appropriate. Using MapPoint for Location Technologies discussed: Windows Mobile 6, MapPoint Code download available at: code.msdn.microsoft.com/mag200901Mobile 88 msdn magazine My location-aware task list application, named wheretodo, needs to perform several core tasks. It needs to get information about where the phone is located geographically. It also needs to store and monitor tasks. Furthermore, the application needs to know what shops and services are available near the phone’s current location that could be used to solve a current task. Finally, it needs to provide alerts to the phone. The interface of the application is shown in Figure 1. The first thing the app requires is geographical data. For the http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mag200901Mobile

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - January 2009

Toolbox CLR Inside Out Basic Instincts Cutting Edge Test Run First Look� Geneva Framework Silverlight Windows Mobile Service Station Security Briefs Extreme ASP.NET Foundations .NET Matters { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.