Controls for creating a map? - wpf

I need to find a control that can be used to construct a map.
I'm looking for something where a user can specify a location and then drag markers from a toolbar onto the map. Loading/saving would be a plus
I tried Telertik Map , IG and also Component One but I'm not 100% sure about these products.

You might try hosting Google Maps in WPF; it has a fairly complete API.
Any of the components you listed would definitely get the job done (personally, I prefer Infragistics), but they will be expensive.
Finally, you could head a different direction and try to go open-source. SharpMap might be worth investigation. This question has more details.

There is now a WPF Bing Maps Control
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2012/01/12/announcing-the-bing-maps-windows-presentation-foundation-control-v1.aspx

Related

Mobile hybrid t-shirt app, what framework/tools to use?

I want to create a mobile t-shirt app and I am just starting with mobile programming. The information is scattered and frankly I am not sure what are the best tools to use. I want to use AngularJS, and there are some directives to help with the canvas, but I am confused.
What do you think, what are the most appropriate tools to use? There will probably be a canvas as you should be able to choose a design and drop it on the t-shirt and customize the size or position further. Any help? Thanks a lot!
You don't actually need a canvas for that.
Have all designs as separate elements (may be png images). Initially have designs somewhere in other container which a user can pick, drag and drop onto t-shirt.You can use ngDraggable for achieving that. Change the css property "position" of dropped images to "absolute" so that user can place it anywhere on t-shirt. Next, user can select t-shirt and on touchmove event change css property "transform" to "scale" based on how much he drags(captured by touchmove's event object).
If you are planning for a hybrid app, go for Ionic Framework, as angular comes packaged with it. Else if are planning for a better UX (user experience, while all dragging and dropping events so that the feel of the app gives a native feel), you can see famo.us-angular Framwork.

ESRI silverlight print map without using print task

I have a silverlight application which different panels, One of the panel contains the ESRI map, I want to print what is coming on the map panel, It's more like a print screen for map (but it should not include rest of the controls of the client application).
On investigation I found that we can use PrintTask but it uses GP server. I do not want to invoke the ESRI service for print.
Is there any other way to print what is coming on the screen (inside the map panel) in the silver light?
Atul Sureka
If you are using the latest version of the Esri Silverlight API, you have access to client side printing. See their example here:
https://developers.arcgis.com/silverlight/sample-code/start.htm#ClientPrinting
It is nice in that it gives you a proper WYSIWYG interface for printing, visibly seeing the extent and can handle custom markers way better than the print service. The downside is though that unless your source map is high enough resolution you'll end up with quite low-res maps unless you perform some kind of map switching when a user triggers the print interface. You'll also need to define print templates in xaml rather than in ArcMap.
It basically boils down to cloning your map and copying all the layers across.

Looking for a simple Silverlight map component

I am looking for a light-weight map component that displays a map of the US and allows users to click on a State and see information pertaining to that state. The data I want to display is in my database. I just need to know what state was selected so I can display the detail. This is something I am doing to get familiar with Silverlight.
All the searches for Silverlight/ Maps I have done so far have pointed me at solutions that are far more complicated than I need. My perception is that using Bing Maps to do this simple task would a waste of the features provide by Bing.
Anyone know of such a Component? Am I wrong that Bing Maps is not the right tool for the job?
TIA!
If you have access to Expression Studio (specifically Expression Design), creating maps as vector based images is quite easy. Poly-paths in Xaml are also relatively efficient to store and serve up compared to images.
You import a map as a background image and use the pen tool to dot-to-dot trace around the country. Combine all those path segments into a single path. Then create a separate poly-path for each state (close them to allow for a fill).
It will take a few hours to build all this (I know having done this for a world map country selector... took 4-5 hours solid for the one polygon styled below):
By having each state represented by a filled polygon-path highlighting (by changing the fill colour) is trivial on mouse-enter/mouse-leave events.
If you want stylistic map, remove the image, otherwise use transparency on the state polygons to show the map through the roll-overs.
Update:
And if you get yourself a graphic tablet and pen this sort of point-to-point work is about 5 times faster than with a mouse!
The interaction with Bing Maps in Silverlight is really strong and provide you with easy communication between the map and your data. I would give Bing Maps a try.
I'm not sure if you've already come across this, but it seems you can also use the control with custom tile sources. Here are a few resources.
http://www.cadmaps.com/gisblog/?p=54
http://developers.de/blogs/damir_dobric/archive/2009/11/16/implementing-custom-map-in-silverlight-map-control.aspx
http://labs.mandogroup.com/skinning-the-silverlight-bing-maps-control/
Custom Rendering in Bing Silverlight Control

Silverlight Organisation chart control

Anyone know which control they used on this site to get the Organisation chart? http://www.yworks.com/products/yfilessilverlight/SilverChart.html
Or any other controls that are similiar?
If not, could you suggest a way on how to get started building one? (Interface-wise, I think I know how to get the data binding to work).
The organisation chart control is their own, thats whole point of the demo page.
The UI elements involved are quite simple rectangular items. The real trick is calculating their placement on panel and routing the connecting lines.
I guess the missing peice of the puzzle is what generically we would call that. If you know that then you have a basis for a web search for algorithms for doing this sort of thing either academically or in some other product entirely, then bring that knowledge to your own Silverlight code.
Alternatively you could just go out buy the product.

Designing a WPF map control

I'm thinking about making a simple map control in WPF, and am thinking about the design of the basic map interface and am wondering if anyone has some good advice for this.
What I'm thinking of is using a ScrollViewer (sans scroll bars) as my "view port" and then stacking everything up on top of a canvas. From Z-Index=0 up, I'm thinking:
Base canvas for lat/long calculations, control positioning, Z-Index stacking.
Multiple Grid elements to represent the maps at different zoom levels. Using a grid to make tiling easier.
Map objects with positional data.
Map controls (zoom slider, overview, etc).
Scroll viewer with mouse move events for panning and zooming.
Any comments suggestions on how I should be building this?
If you're looking for a good start, you can use the foundation of code supplied by the SharpMap project and build out from there. If I recall there were a few people already working on a WPF renderer for SharpMap, so you may also have some code to begin with.
I've personally used SharpMap in a C# 2.0 application that combined GIS data with real time GPS data, and it was very successful. SharpMap provided me the transformation suite to handle GIS data, along with the mathematical foundation to work with altering GIS information. It should be relatively straightforward to use the non-rendering code with a WPF frontend, as they already have presentation separated from the data.
(EDIT: added more details about how I used SharpMap)
It is probably a roundabout way of going about it, but you might find some useful stuff in the javascript and XAML from SilverlightEarth.com which a Silverlight 1.0-based map-tile-client. It can load VE, Google, Yahoo (there is a DeepZoom version that can load OpenStreetMap, Moon and Mars too; but since it uses MSI it doesn't really help on the WPF 3/3.5 front).
Although the javascript is a little untidy, you can clearly see it is creating a Silverlight 1.0 Xaml (dynamically sized) Canvas, filling it with tiles (Image controls) and handling zoom in/out and pan requests. You would need to make sense of all the javascript and convert it to C# - the XAML should mostly come into WPF unaltered. I have tested this Silverlight 1.0 with a Deep Zoom tile pyramid (and here) so the concepts are applicable (ie. not just for maps).
I know this works because I have done it myself to build the map viewer in Geoquery2008.com (screenshot) which is WPF/c#. Unfortunately the Geoquery2008 assemblies are obfuscated, but you might still glean some ideas or useful code via DASM/Reflector. It is still a beta so I wouldn't claim it is 100% done. I hadn't really thought of factoring out the map code into a separate control but may I will look into that if another one doesn't appear...
Incidentally I also started off with the ScrollViewer, but am planning to ditch it and mimic the javascript more closely so it's easier to re-use Image objects when panning/zooming (by gaining more control over the process than ScrollViewer provides).
These MSDN pages on the Virtual Earth tile system and the Deep Zoom file format and related links is probably also a useful reference.
Finally - I guess you've seen since this post that DeepZoom/MultiScaleImage is likely to be in .NET 4.0/Studio 2010.
Your desire to create a WPF mapping tool is similar to mine, which lead me to ask this question about DeepZoom (aka MultiScaleImage) from Silverlight. I want a WPF version. The accepted answer provides a link to a very good starting point (similar to your described thought process).
Virtual Earth has something favour to WPF
Don't know if you use ESRI software, but I hear there developing a Silverlight API for there stack so you might want to hold off.
It does not fall on my field of work at all, but you may have a look at MapWindow GIS, which has an Open Source ActiveX object that provides a lot of mapping and GIS features.
Here is a post explaining how to embed it on WPF applications:
http://www.mapwindow.org/phorum/read.php?13,13484
Download Bing Maps WPF Control sdk(Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.WPF.dll).Add as dll as referance,then change the XAML as below
**
<Window x:Class="WPFTestApplication.InsertPushpin"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
xmlns:m="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.WPF;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.WPF"
Width="1024" Height="768">
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
<m:Map CredentialsProvider="INSERT_YOUR_BING_MAPS_KEY"
Center="47.620574,-122.34942" ZoomLevel="12">
<m:Pushpin Location="47.620574,-122.34942"/>
</m:Map>
</Grid>
</Window>
**
The main question is how you store and access the items you are going to put in the map (assuming this isn't just a picture display). Lookup scenegraph for some ideas.
Also if you want it to be more than a toy image viewer the lat long to XY scaling can get 'interesting'
Don't build it yourself - use the WPF Bing Maps Control
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2012/01/12/announcing-the-bing-maps-windows-presentation-foundation-control-v1.aspx
the Bing Maps Windows Presentation Foundation Control v1 is best map control in WPF.
Support for tile layers – you can now overlay your own tile layers atop the map control.
Turning off the base tile layer – this is useful for when you don’t need/want to use our base map tiles and instead would prefer to use your own without overlaying them atop of ours.The control won’t request the tiles which reduces downloads and improves rendering performance.
SSL Support – since many of you are using the WPF control in secure applications, you can now make tile and service request over SSL without issue.
Hiding the scale bar – if you don’t want a scale bar (perhaps your map is small and the scale bar clutters the map) you can turn it off. In fact, the only elements you can’t turn off are the Bing logo and the copyrights.
New copyright service – provides accurate copyright for our data vendors. Additional inertia – inertia is now enabled for the mouse and is on by default for touch.
Miscellaneous bug fixes – thanks for the feedback on the MSDN Forums, the Bing Maps Blog, e-mail and Twitter. Good finds people.

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