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Chapter 1
Getting Started with Microsoft
and Mapping
Location and mapping play an increasingly important role in software today. The advent of location-aware social
applications, web sites like Bing Maps, Google Maps, and Yelp, mobile mapping and navigation applications, and
location-aware games like Shadow Cities by Grey Area have all increased customer demand for software that knows,
presents, and uses your location in helpful ways.
Building these applications from scratch is not easy—in addition to the usual problems of scaling and software
development in general, location-aware applications pose additional problems in the area of content (such as
the underlying map, points of interest, traffic, and routing), and the back-end storage necessary to quickly index,
store, and search data by its position on the earth. Open-source solutions exist; many database vendors have SQL
extensions for storing data such as latitude and longitude, and there are user interface controls for a number of
platforms, such as Google Maps for the Web and controls on Android and iOS. Only Microsoft, however, provides a
soup-to-nuts solution for writing location-aware applications including:
Microsoft SQL Server, which provides support for geospatial types and operations,•
Windows Azure, which provides platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service •
(IaaS) solutions for hosting your application’s services,
Bing Maps controls for presenting maps with your data on the web and in native applications •
on Windows and iOS,
Services provided for traffic and routing overlaid on Bing Maps controls.•
In this chapter, we introduce what Microsoft offers to you and how this book is organized. After reading this chapter,
you’ll have a good understanding of how Microsoft technologies can help you build your location-aware application,
how this book is organized, and where to turn next to learn the gritty details you need to build your application.
Mapping and Microsoft
Microsoft has a long history in providing software for mapping, starting with Microsoft MapPoint (first launched in
2000) and TerraServer, a collaboration between Microsoft Research (MSR) and the United States Geological Service
(USGS) in continuous operation from 1998 through May of 2012, as well as the various iterations of Web-based
mapping solutions culminating in Bing Maps. In addition to making map data available in commercial software and
online, Microsoft also makes its map control available for Windows, permitting native application developers access
to the same visual presentation as Microsoft provides on its Web sites. In addition, Microsoft has provided significant
back-end support for applications that use location and map data, starting with support for geospatial data types
introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 with continued support in releases through the present day. More recently,
Microsoft has made these features of Microsoft SQL Server available as part of the SQL Database service on Windows
Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing service. Let’s take a closer look at the capabilities Microsoft provides.