An introduction to MapPoint?   

Hello, I'ma junior programmer at a technology company and I've been asked to 
do some research for a new feature planned for one of our products (a desktop 
app written in C#). One of the things this product does is collect clients' 
street address information, and the feature we're looking at implementing 
will have to involve fetching the longitude and latitude value for these 
street addresses. A map to preview where exactly the retrieved long & lat 
values point to may be desirable, but at the moment I'm just interested in 
the geocoding side of things. I'm a good programmer but an inexperienced one, 
and I have so many questions about doing this that I don't know where to 
start. 

Can I use the MapPoint web service to fetch this information? 

Do I have to sign up for and/or pay to get access to the MapPoint web 
service? 

Ideally what I'd like is to throw a street address (or multiple street 
addresses) at the webservice (eg "123 Fake Street, Suburb, Country") and 
getback some coordinates ("123E, 45S"). Is it that simple? 

On a more general note, I've never programmed using web services before, it 
it safe to assume that the .NET framework makes accessing web services easy? 

How do I access the MapPoint web service from my program? Can anyone direct 
me to a set of clear instructions on how to do this? Cuz I haven't yet found 
any instructions that explain how do to this from the very beginning.

Thanks for helping out a noob ;-)

date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:21:00 -0700   author:   Adam M Adam

RE: An introduction to MapPoint?   

Adam,

Using web services (especially Mappoint WS) is very easy in .NET thanks to 
the abstraction of the magical "Add Web References" button so that all the 
grunt work is done for you behind the scenes.  You'll need a developer 
(Trial) account and a good read through the MSDN for starters:

https://mappoint-css.live.com/mwssignup/Default.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa492550.aspx

Hope that helps,
-- 
Infusion Development
http://www.infusion.com


"Adam M" wrote:

> Hello, I'ma junior programmer at a technology company and I've been asked to 
> do some research for a new feature planned for one of our products (a desktop 
> app written in C#). One of the things this product does is collect clients' 
> street address information, and the feature we're looking at implementing 
> will have to involve fetching the longitude and latitude value for these 
> street addresses. A map to preview where exactly the retrieved long & lat 
> values point to may be desirable, but at the moment I'm just interested in 
> the geocoding side of things. I'm a good programmer but an inexperienced one, 
> and I have so many questions about doing this that I don't know where to 
> start. 
> 
> Can I use the MapPoint web service to fetch this information? 
> 
> Do I have to sign up for and/or pay to get access to the MapPoint web 
> service? 
> 
> Ideally what I'd like is to throw a street address (or multiple street 
> addresses) at the webservice (eg "123 Fake Street, Suburb, Country") and 
> getback some coordinates ("123E, 45S"). Is it that simple? 
> 
> On a more general note, I've never programmed using web services before, it 
> it safe to assume that the .NET framework makes accessing web services easy? 
> 
> How do I access the MapPoint web service from my program? Can anyone direct 
> me to a set of clear instructions on how to do this? Cuz I haven't yet found 
> any instructions that explain how do to this from the very beginning.
> 
> Thanks for helping out a noob ;-)

date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:44:01 -0700   author:   Derek Chan