Tuesday - January 18, 2011

Nominate Your Favorite MapPoint Addin or Extension and Win!, Publishing MapPoint Maps To Mobile Devices, and More

Welcome to another issue of the MP2Kmag Update. Our last issue came out during the Holiday season, if you missed it you can catch up and read it online here.

Again, in this issue we invite you to nominate your favorite MapPoint addin or extension and share how you find the tool useful in your day to day work. Everyone who nominates a tool will be entered into a drawing for the winner's choice of the books MapPoint for Dummies or Programming MapPoint in .NET. In an upcoming issue we will give you the opportunity to vote in order to determine what are the most popular MapPoint addins or extensions among our readers.

Wilfried Mestdagh and Kathleen Anne Gaiser contributed articles about developing with Visual Studio and ESRI BusinessMap respectively. Also, I wrote up a fun little macro which shows how you can automatically and inexpensively create and push updated map images to mobile devices.

MP2K Magazine is your source for independent news and information about MapPoint and other Microsoft mapping technologies and we also host the popular web forum for MapPoint users and developers (www.mapforums.com).

This Issue's Contents at a Glance
- MapPoint Addins and Extensions - Nominate Your Favorite and Win!
- TIP 1: What Is and Isn't Exported to GPX Format
- TIP 2: Programming MapPoint Shape Colors
- BONUS TIP: How to Export Route Coordinates
- Get Published in MP2K Magazine
- Developing with MapPoint and Visual Studio Part 2: The ActiveX Component
- Finding a Replacement for ESRI BusinessMap
- Automatically (and Inexpensively!) Publishing MapPoint Maps to Mobile Devices
- Fast Geocoding of Addresses in C# with MapPoint

Happy Mapping and please forward this newsletter to anyone who would be interested!

---

Features

MapPoint Addins and Extensions - Nominate Your Favorite!

Since the inception of the MapPoint product, a great number of third-party tools, both free and commercial and have been developed for Microsoft MapPoint. In upcoming issues we will be exploring some of these in depth, but first we want to hear what you and other readers find most useful in your daily work.

Post as a reply to this thread on MapForums to share your favorite MapPoint addins or tools. You must first be registered in the MapForums discussion board.

TIP 1: What Is and Isn't Exported to GPX Format

The ability to import and export GPX format, both from within the MapPoint application and also programmatically via new methods in MapPoint 2010, is one of the best new features added to MapPoint.

Not everything that can be depicted in MapPoint necessarily has an equivalent in the GPX format, so you wouldn't expect anything and everything to be exported, so we set up a test to check it out. See the results in this post in the Tips & Tricks section on MapForums - What Is and Isn't Exported to GPX.

TIP 2: Programming MapPoint Shape Colors

The Fill and Line colors for MapPoint shapes are limited to forty colors which are listed in this helpful article on MSDN - Using Shape Color Values in MapPoint. Pasting that code into your project and having those constants are great, but often it's easier to work with Integer values and those Hex values are not trivial to work with in code. It is fairly straightforward however to convert them to Integers in Excel using some string manipulation and the HEX2DEC function.

See this recent post - Setting MapPoint Line Color by Variable in VBA - for more information and to download a  spreadsheet with all of the Integer values.

BONUS TIP: How to Export Route Coordinates

The MapPoint Route is a special object in MapPoint, and it is not defined as a shape. If you want to get the route shape details, you are limited to using the Locations of stops in the list of Waypoint, which would not include most roads or turns along the route. Richard Marsden pointed out in this recent post - How to Get GPS Coordinates by Interval on the Route in MapPoint - that if you include a rest stop every minute, you can get the Location every minute along a route giving an approximate shape for the route!

MapPoint Consultants and Products Directories

Find developers and experienced MapPoint consultants who can help you with your next project or program costum solutions helping to integrate MapPoint with your business processes.

If you are a consultant who know MapPoint or Bing Maps, this is a terrific way to read our audience and share information about your capabilities, services, describe past projects, and communicate your availability. You are welcome to post your resume and keep your thread or profile updated periodically with references, new offerings, and contant information. Get started today by posting "New Thread" in the MapPoint Consultant Directory. Listings are free, but there is also an opportunity to become a sponsor for a more prominent listing and a link from the home page.
Similarly, last year, we also started a new Products Directory for MapPoint Add-ins, Bing Maps tools, and related products. If you have a MapPoint/Bing Maps Add-in or tool, list it in here to get some great visibility and exposure for your product. To keep your product near the front of the directory, you can post periodically updates, tutorials, case studies, or other new information about your product.

New MapForums Twitter Integration

Follow MapForums on Twitter! We frequently highlight new topics via our Twitter account "MapForums". We have also installed TweetBoard on MapForums, a toolbar which floats on the left side of the MapForums site, and pulls in a threaded view of Twitter conversations related to the MapForums posts. Check it out - go to www.MapForums.com, and click on the tab that says "tweets" on the left.

Examples of recent posts in MapForums highlighted in Twitter and which appear in the TweetBoard:
- How to Get GPS Coordinates by Interval on the Route
- Whither BusinessMap Add-On Tools?
- Retrieve US State from Directions
- Matching Census Tracts...some match, some don't
- Drawing Lines Between City/State Pairs
- Exporting with new information
- Automatically Publishing MapPoint Maps to Mobile Devices

Twitter users - keep abreast of all MapPoint news and the community by following the MapForums twitter account.

Get Published in MP2K Magazine

If you have a MapPoint presentation, neat programming technique, or would simply like to share the ways in which you are using MapPoint technology or any other ideas, contact us to discuss how we can turn your knowledge into an article and share your experience with the rest of the MapPoint community of users and developers.

Thanks to Marvin Hlavac for allowing us to use the picture on the right of his Maltese puppy eating from the MapPoint mug.

"Sometimes people think MapPoint's architecture is so archaic is doesn't work with modern development tools. Well, nothing is less true. Every modern development tool is perfecly suited to use. This article is a small tutorial on how to start with MapPoint in VS2010, using the provided ActiveX control.

"OK, let's do it. I assume you have installed Visual Studio 2010 and MapPoint 2010 (or any other version).

"We start the development tool and create a new windows forms application. First thing to do is to add the MapPoint control to the toolbox. To do this right click in the toolbox and click on 'Choose Items' as shown below."

Full article text Discuss this story

Finding a Replacement for ESRI BusinessMap
"From my interview forward, I discussed bringing mapping into our resources to aid clients and prospects. After a time, it came to be that we purchased ESRI BusinessMap, which met our needs perfectly. Unfortunately, in March of 2010, ESRI announced they were discontinuing BusinessMap, so the long search was on to find a replacement.

I believed our needs to be very basic but was surprised to find locating a replacement to be rather difficult. Our needs were as follows:"

Full article text Discuss this story
 
Automatically (and Inexpensively!) Publishing MapPoint Maps to Mobile Devices

"This is a fairly simple Excel macro which automatically runs when the macro workbook is opened and creates maps and copies the graphics via FTP to a web server. The images are sized to 800 x 480 which happens to be the dimensions of my HTC EVO phone. If publishing to another device such as an iPad (1024 by 768 ) you could modify the dimensions in the Excel macro.

This project consists of four files. One macro-enabled Excel workbook (.xlsm), one normal data workbook (.xlsx), and two MapPoint .ptm files. For whatever reason, MapPoint does not recognize nor is able to import directly from .xlsm files, thus the need for a separate Excel data workbook."

Full article text Discuss this story
 
Fast Geocoding of Addresses in C# with MapPoint

"Everybody is into geocoding today. Once you have the latitude and longitude of a location, you can start to do some really interesting things. But the problem is that if you have a large database of addresses to geocode, the various web-based APIs are not your friend. Not only is there a lot of latency involved in each webservice call, they are also rate-limited and consequently geocoding several million or more addresses simply becomes unfeasible."

Full article text Discuss this story

Programming MapPoint in .NET Chandu Thota's New Book from O'Reilly Press Free USPS Priority Shipping within U.S. - $48 The first and only book in print on programming MapPoint technologies. The book includes sections on MapPoint 2004, the MapPoint Web Service, MapPoint Location Server, and Virtual Earth. The books is 354 pages chock full of programming examples and map screenshots. For example, the book spends 40 pages discussing in depth the various Data Map styles in MapPoint, dissects the DisplayDataMap method in detail, and has a number of examples of importing data from various sources. There are over 100 pages on the MapPoint Web Service including sections on the Find, Route, and Render API's. Inquire about international shipping and multiple copy discounts. Take your MapPoint programming to the next level! Order Your Copy Today - Free Shipping!