Soul Solutions

List of links to all the SQL 2008 Spatial Methods

veblog@soulsolutions.com.au — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:32:52 GMT

I always struggle to find the full list of SQL 2008 Spatial methods for Geography when I need them so this is really just a helper post so I can find them again later but maybe it will help you also. Since they are case sensitive and don’t have intelisence I can never remember the syntax.

And from http://sqlspatialtools.codeplex.com

Functions

These static methods, implemented in the class Functions, can both be registered in SQL Server and used through T-SQL, as well as be used directly from the CLR:
bool IsValidGeographyFromGeometry(SqlGeometry geometry)
Check if an input geometry can represent a valid geography without throwing an exception.
This function requires that the geometry be in longitude/latitude coordinates and that
those coordinates are in correct order in the geometry instance (i.e. latitude/longitude
not longitude/latitude). This function will return false (0) if the input geometry is not
in the correct latitude/longitude format, including a valid geography SRID.
bool IsValidGeographyFromText(string inputWKT, int srid)
Check if an input WKT can represent a valid geography. This function requires that
the WTK coordinate values are longitude/latitude values, in that order and that a valid
geography SRID value is supplied. This function will not throw an exception even in
edge conditions (i.e. longitude/latitude coordinates are reversed to latitude/longitude).
SqlGeography MakeValidGeographyFromGeometry(SqlGeometry geometry)
Convert an input geometry instance to a valid geography instance.
This function requires that the WKT coordinate values are longitude/latitude values,
in that order and that a valid geography SRID value is supplied.
SqlGeography MakeValidGeographyFromText(string inputWKT, int srid)
Convert an input WKT to a valid geography instance.
This function requires that the WKT coordinate values are longitude/latitude values,
in that order and that a valid geography SRID value is supplied.
SqlGeography ConvexHullGeography(SqlGeography geography)
Computes ConvexHull of input geography and returns a polygon (unless all input points are colinear).
SqlGeography ConvexHullGeographyFromText(string inputWKT, int srid)
Computes ConvexHull of input WKT and returns a polygon (unless all input points are colinear).
This function does not require its input to be a valid geography. This function does require
that the WKT coordinate values are longitude/latitude values, in that order and that a valid
geography SRID value is supplied.
SqlGeography DensifyGeography(SqlGeography g, double maxAngle)
Returns a geography instance equivalent to its input, but with no two consecutive points spaced more than maxAngle apart.
SqlGeography InterpolateBetweenGeog(SqlGeography start, SqlGeography end, double distance)
Takes start and end geography points and returns a new point that is a given distance from the start toward the end.
SqlGeometry InterpolateBetweenGeom(SqlGeometry start, SqlGeometry end, double distance)
Takes start and end geometry points and returns a new point that is a given distance from the start toward the end.
SqlGeography LocateAlongGeog(SqlGeography g, double distance)
Takes a geography linestring and finds the point a given distance along it.
SqlGeometry LocateAlongGeom(SqlGeometry g, double distance)
Takes a geometry linestring and finds the point a given distance along it.
SqlGeometry ShiftGeometry(SqlGeometry g, double xShift, double yShift)
Takes a geometry instance and shifts if by a given X and Y amount.
SqlGeometry VacuousGeographyToGeometry(SqlGeography toConvert, int targetSrid)
A special case of the equirectangular projection, taking each point (lat,long) --> (y, x).
SqlGeography VacuousGeometryToGeography(SqlGeometry toConvert, int targetSrid)
The inverse of the VacuousGeographyToGeometry projection.

Types

These types can be registered in SQL Server or used directly through the CLR.
SqlProjection
This class provides an extensible access point to various projections and inverse projections. See the file projection_example.sql for a sample of its use. Currently supported projections are:

Albers Equal Area
Equirectangular
Lambert Conformal Conic
Mercator
Oblique Mercator
Tranverse Mercator
Gnomonic

AffineTransform
This provides general affine transformations. See the example transform_example.sql for a sample of its use.

Aggregates

While implemented as classes, aggregates are essentially functions that take a collection of inputs to a single result.
GeographyUnionAggregate
This aggregate computes the union of a set of geographies.
GeometryEnvelopeAggregate
This aggregate computes the envelope of a set of input geometries.

Technorati Tags: SQL2008,Spatial,Geography,Spatial Toolkit

Drawing a circle in Bing Maps

veblog@soulsolutions.com.au — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:33:01 GMT

I noticed my old code samples around the place are a little outdated so I created this little sample based off the Bing Maps iSDK today. This is a little helper function that calculates 360 points around the location provided at the given radius in KM. The co-ordinates are quite accurate and you will notice the effects of adding a circle at different Latitudes on the Mercator map.

Full source:

DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
   <head>
      <title>Circle Example Bing Mapstitle>
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
      <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2">script>
      <script type="text/javascript">
          var map = null;
          var pinid = 0;

          function GetMap() {
              map = new VEMap('myMap');
              map.LoadMap();
              map.SetZoomLevel(2);
          }

          function AddPolyline() {
              var ll = map.GetCenter();
              var shape = new VEShape(VEShapeType.Polyline, getCircle(ll, 100));
              shape.SetTitle('My circle');
              shape.SetDescription('This is shape number ' + pinid);
              pinid++;
              map.AddShape(shape);
          }
          
          function getCircle(loc, radius) {
              var R = 6371; // earth's mean radius in km
              var lat = (loc.Latitude * Math.PI) / 180; //rad
              var lon = (loc.Longitude * Math.PI) / 180; //rad
              var d = parseFloat(radius) / R;  // d = angular distance covered on earth's surface
              var locs = new Array();
              for (x = 0; x <= 360; x++) {
                  var p2 = new VELatLong(0, 0)
                  brng = x * Math.PI / 180; //rad
                  p2.Latitude = Math.asin(Math.sin(lat) * Math.cos(d) + Math.cos(lat) * Math.sin(d) * Math.cos(brng));
                  p2.Longitude = ((lon + Math.atan2(Math.sin(brng) * Math.sin(d) * Math.cos(lat), Math.cos(d) - Math.sin(lat) * Math.sin(p2.Latitude))) * 180) / Math.PI;
                  p2.Latitude = (p2.Latitude * 180) / Math.PI;
                  locs.push(p2);
              }
              return locs;
          }

      
      script>
   head>
   <body onload="GetMap();">
      <div id='myMap' style="position:relative; width:400px; height:400px;">div>
      <div><a href='#' onclick='AddPolyline();'>Add Circlea>div>
   body>
html>

If you’re after a full toolkit of useful functions for Bing Maps you should check out the awesome: http://vetoolkit.codeplex.com/

Technorati Tags: Circle,Bing Maps

Mapping Roadshow pictures

veblog@soulsolutions.com.au — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:45:40 GMT

We were at the Bing Maps roadshow in both Brisbane and Sydney, 10 and 12 June. I’ve finally gotten around to posting a few of the pictures I took from the day in Brisbane. This year the sessions were broken in to customer and partner focus.

First up we had Peter Ulm, the ANZ Region Business Development Manager for Bing Maps for Enterprise, to do a bit of an intro and covered all the licensing details.

Then Chris Pendleton handled the technical stuff. Chris is a Bing Maps Technical Evangelist from the US. He came all the way here to do the roadshow and a session at Remix.

And finally John talked about our experience as a Bing Maps Partner.

Technorati Tags: Bing Maps,Roadshow,Peter Ulm,Chris Pendleton

Getting your custom imagery onto Bing Maps with Global Mapper and the Cloud

veblog@soulsolutions.com.au — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:19:05 GMT

It is actually very easy to display gigabytes of custom imagery on Bing Maps with fantastic results, the trick is to know what tools to use. Read on for a streamlined process for the common geo image formats using Global Mapper, SpaceBlock, Windows Azure and a few helpful tips along the way.

At Bing Map’s core is the ability to render really large images in your browser. Both the AJAX, Silverlight and Mobile versions all use a concept of a tile pyramid to make this possible and effective over the web, you can read more about the tile system in great detail here. Today we are going to look at a process I use to process custom imagery to overlay Bing maps.

In the GIS field these custom images are called raster images and come in various file formats like GeoTiff and ECW. These formats have the images correctly “projected” and include the location co-ordinates. Since the world is not flat in order to view it on a flat surface, like Bing Maps 2D, all the data needs to be “projected” to the Mercator projection. If your custom imagery isn’t already projected and/or not in a Geo image format then the free MapCruncher tool that I will cover in my next post will be more useful for you. Lets assume you have your imagery ready to go in ECW or GeoTiff format.

Global Mapper is a very powerful GIS viewer and data convertor. It supports an amazing number of formats and can export directly to Bing Map tiles. You can open one or many of your ECW or GeoTiff files onto a layer an order as you like. The tool isn’t free but is quite inexpensive and a valuable tool for any Bing Maps developer, join their forums first and look for a discount code before you purchase. I’m going to use a built-in free online data source today so I can show you the results online royalty free and you can follow along.

Step 1. Set your projection.

On the title screen it is the fourth option or choose Tools –> Configure. Under the project tab you will see:

For Bing maps I will choose Mercator and WGS84.

Step 2. Load your data.

Again the welcome screen presents you with 3 options: Open your file, find data online or use a free online source. This is where you would load your GeoTiff or ECW.

For this article I used the free online data from the USGS using a 5 mile bounds from New York.

Step 3. Set a transparency colour and tolerance.

This one is a little tricky to find. Open the control centre (Alt-C) or Tools –> Control Centre. Select your layer and click on Options. Under the Display tab you can select a colour to be transparent and also set small variations of the colour to also be transparent (useful on compressed images).

This is important to get a seamless edge on your custom area but be aware that it could turn areas transparent that you don’t want. Once applied you will see that colour now changed to the default yellow background.

Step 4. Export as Virtual Earth tiles

From the File Menu choose Export Web Formats –> Virtual Earth Tiles.

With every increase in level you create four times the number of tiles then the previous layer. Ideally you should try to match the resolution of the source imagery. Set the number the zoom levels to output, it is easy to turn these off later so I normally export all but the top 4-5. For example here I choose level 16 as my highest since the resolution is pretty poor and 10 levels to export, this mean I will have levels 7->16 in Bing Maps. The export bounds can be set to the whole layer, the current screen or simply draw a box for the area you want.

The export process can take some time depending upon the IO performance of your system, I have global mapper setup on a second computer (actually my media centre PC with fast disks) and remote desktop in from my dev machine.

Step 5. Setup Azure storage

We need to host these tiles on the web, we need a system that is designed to serve many small files. I highly recommend using a cloud based service for this, you can evaluate Windows Azure currently for free. Sign up here, it will take about 2-3 days to get your account. Once you have your account, setup a new storage account. You will need to know your storage account name and shared key for the next step. For a full tutorial on Azure see this awesome post from Katrien.

Step 6. Upload to Azure Blob Storage

I use SpaceBlock to upload and explore Azure Blob Storage, it scales well and allows for multiple accounts.

Under Tools –> Options add your azure account using a key from step 5.

The Azure blob storage can be directly accessed using http, but you need to set the permissions on your container to be public.

The first level of folders in SpaceBlock for Azure are the Azure Containers, from their all the sub folders are just a neat naming trick that SpaceBlock handles for you. You need only set this permission on these top containers.

Step 7. Use in your application.

Now your tiles are public you need to add a tile layer to your application to show them. In the Silverlight CTP control you can do this in your code behind for a Map called “map”:

using System.Windows;
using Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl;

namespace SoulSolutions.TileExample
{
    public partial class Page
    {
        public Page()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            Loaded += Page_Loaded;
        }

        private void Page_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            var tileLayer = new MapTileLayer();
            map.Children.Add(tileLayer);

            //add the overlay
            var tileSource = new LocationRectTileSource(
                "http://brisbane.blob.core.windows.net/tiles/nyDEM/{0}.png",
                new LocationRect(new Location(40.76026, -74.08459), new Location(40.6874, -73.94211)),
                new Range<double>(7, 16));
            tileLayer.TileSources.Add(tileSource);

            map.SetView(new Location(40.71499, -74.00734), 14);
        }
    }
}

See live example here.

In the AJAX control you do this (complete page):

DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
   <head>
      <title>SoulSolutions Tile Example AJAXtitle>
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
      <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2">script>
      <script type="text/javascript">
         var map = null;
         var tileLayer;
         
         function GetMap()
         {
            map = new VEMap('myMap');
            map.LoadMap(new VELatLong(40.71499, -74.00734), 14, 'a', false);
            GetTiles();
         }   
         
         function GetTiles()
         {
             var bounds = [new VELatLongRectangle(new VELatLong(40.76026, -74.08459), new VELatLong(40.6874, -73.94211))];

            var tileSourceSpec = new VETileSourceSpecification("lidar", "http://brisbane.blob.core.windows.net/tiles/nyDEM/%4.png");
            tileSourceSpec.NumServers = 1;
            tileSourceSpec.Bounds = bounds;
            tileSourceSpec.MinZoomLevel = 7;
            tileSourceSpec.MaxZoomLevel = 16;
            tileSourceSpec.Opacity = 0.8;
            tileSourceSpec.ZIndex = 100;

            map.AddTileLayer(tileSourceSpec, true);
         }  
      script>
          <style type="text/css">
    html, body {
        height: 100%;
        overflow: auto;
    }
    body {
        padding: 0;
        margin: 0;
    }
    style>
   head>
   <body onload="GetMap();">
      <div id='myMap' style="position:relative; width:100%; height:100%;">div>
   body>
html>

See live example here.

And of coarse you can change to 3D mode and get this awesome effect:

In both examples you have to specify:

URL to the tiles, with parameter to be replaced with quadkey filename
The bounds of the tile layer
The valid zoom levels

Thankfully GlobalMapper produces a .htm file in its output path that will specify these settings for you. However I find it is a little generous and I then use my location chooser to trim this down a little.

I hope you enjoyed this article and feel inspired to tile out your own custom imagery and overlay on Bing Maps to enhance your application.

Technorati Tags: Bing Maps,Virtual Earth,Global Mapper,SpaceBlock,Azure,Tiles

Multiple Bing Maps with Blacklight

veblog@soulsolutions.com.au — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:20:38 GMT

I’ve been exploring some of the fantastic Silverlight panel systems out there and was blown away by the Drag Dock Panel in the open source Blacklight project.

See the full demo here:

http://soulsolutions.com.au/silverlight/blacklight/

It is very impressive and makes you rethink how you may design your next LOB Bing Maps application. The panel system lets you add as many elements as your like and then drag them around or impressively make one larger with the other stacked up:

Imagine a tracking application where you could allow the user to dynamically add new map panes and in real time track many assets individually.

There is no reason why the panels couldn’t be other controls like silverlight charts or dials. It could be a very impressive dashboard.

The Blacklight project is available on codeplex: http://blacklight.codeplex.com/

Martin Grayson appears to be the man behind it from Microsoft in the UK, awesome work!

Here is a simple snippet of the xaml code to show how easy this is to use:

<UserControl x:Class="ExpandingPanel.Page"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 
    xmlns:controls="clr-namespace:Blacklight.Controls;assembly=Blacklight.Controls" 
    xmlns:MapControl="clr-namespace:Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl" >
    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
        <controls:DragDockPanelHost x:Name="dragDockPanelHost">
            <controls:DragDockPanel DraggingEnabled="False" Margin="15" Header="Map View 1">
                <MapControl:Map>MapControl:Map>
            controls:DragDockPanel>
            <controls:DragDockPanel Margin="15" Header="Map View 2">
                <MapControl:Map>MapControl:Map>
            controls:DragDockPanel>
            <controls:DragDockPanel Margin="15" Header="Map View 3">
                <MapControl:Map>MapControl:Map>
            controls:DragDockPanel>
            <controls:DragDockPanel Margin="15" Header="Map View 4">
                <MapControl:Map>MapControl:Map>
            controls:DragDockPanel>
            <controls:DragDockPanel Margin="15" Header="Map View 5">
                <MapControl:Map>MapControl:Map>
            controls:DragDockPanel>
            <controls:DragDockPanel Margin="15" Header="Map View 6">
                <MapControl:Map>MapControl:Map>
            controls:DragDockPanel>
        controls:DragDockPanelHost>
    Grid>
UserControl>

What application uses do you think this would be suitable for?

Girl Geek Dinner 6 with Kay Lam-Beattie

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:25:14 GMT

For our July Girl Geek Dinner we're heading to The Hutch Bistro at New Farm and we're fortunate to have Kay Lam-Beattie as our guest speaker. So gather all of your legal/IT questions to ask Kay on the night!

About Kay:

Kay graduated from QUT in 1992 with a Bachelor of Business (Accountancy) and an honours degree in Law. To obtain more specialised skills, Kay also completed a Masters in Law concentrating on the areas of intellectual property (IP) and IT-related legal issues, as well as a Graduate Certificate in IT.

Kay has been the principal of IDEALAW (and its predecessor Legal Capital Lawyers) since 2005.

Kay’s broadly based academic qualifications places her in an ideal position not only to understand the intricacies of her specialist areas of IT and IP related law, but also technical IT and business issues. Kay also speaks conversational Japanese, having lived and worked in Japan for a number of years.

Who is invited?

If you are a geek and a girl or know of one who is willing to escort you then you are welcome and encouraged to come along. There is a technical focus with the intention of having fun and connecting with other women in IT.

Who pays for dinner?
This month is not sponsored so you will have to pay for your own dinner

Where + When
Date: Thursday 2nd July, 2009
Time: 7:00 pm
Where: The Hutch Bistro

75 Welsby Street, New Farm

http://www.thehutchbistro.com.au/food-wine.html

Technorati Tags: Girl Geek Dinners,Brisbane,Kay Lam-Beattie,WIT

Running the Messenger Samples

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 06:13:19 GMT

I downloaded the sample app for the Windows Live Messenger bits in preparation for our talk at Remix next week. If you haven’t played with it, the WebToolkit Sample site is a great starting place! There’s a couple of things you have to do to get them running so I thought it’d be a good idea to write these down for others.

Firstly, you’ll need an application id, so make sure you go to the Azure Services Developer Portal: https://lx.azure.microsoft.com/Cloud/Provisioning/Default.aspx and create a new project with a Live Services: Existing APIs type. Make sure you remember the domain name and URL you chose e.g. I picked remixdemo.com.au and return URL of http://remixdemo.com.au/Messenger/Default.aspx and also note down your app_id and secret key as you’ll need them to run the samples.

Make sure you add an entry in your hosts file for the domain you chose so you can run the application locally. To do this open notepad as administrator, and open the hosts file located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and create an entry like: 127.0.0.1 remixdemo.com.au

Next, I went to IIS and created a virtual directory called Messenger and pointed it to the SampleSite. To run the application I browsed to http://remixdemo.com.au/messenger/Default.aspx.

Make sure you setup your site in the web.config to use your app_id, secret key and correct urls. The one that caught me out was the app_provisioned_usertoken. I was getting an exception in the User.cs class for consent.IsValid() until I set the value to empty string e.g.

<add key="app_provisioned_usertoken" value="">add>

Make sure you set the app_logo to point to the pulse logo so your login screen has the correct image e.g.

<add key="app_logo" 
     value="http://remixdemo.com.au/messenger/App_Images/PulseLogo.gif">
add>

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Messenger Toolkit,Sample App,Configuration

Setting Fonts in WPF

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:51:06 GMT

Fonts Setting fonts used to be a bit painful but I’ve found it quite easy in WPF. In my project I’ve copied the font files into a directory structure: \Resources\Fonts and I have a font file masanreg.ttf which contains the font called MasonSansRegular.

To use the font in Xaml if just reference the path to the font and the font name prefixed with a # e.g.

FontFamily="./Resources/Fonts/#MasonSansRegular"

You can also see the list in Blend under the Text section

Technorati Tags: WPF,Fonts

Moving the current item in a ListBox

Sun, 31 May 2009 03:33:24 GMT

I’ve been using ListBoxes with IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem property set to True to do a lot of master/detail views recently. When using MVVM with Command Pattern it’s wasn’t immediately obvious to me how to manipulate which item was selected when I added/removed etc from the list.

If I’ve just created a client record and added it to my ObservableCollection of Clients in my viewModel I can use CollectionViewSource to get a hold of the view and manipulate the current item e.g.

CollectionViewSource.GetDefaultView(viewModel.Clients).MoveCurrentTo(client);

Technorati Tags: WPF,CollectionViewSource

Changing DataTemplates in WPF with DataTriggers

Sun, 31 May 2009 03:26:43 GMT

I’ve come across a few times when I want to change the layout and contents of my screen depending on what data I have in my object. I’ve found DataTriggers really useful for this. Based on a field being populated or not is can switch out the actual template I apply to the ContentTemplate e.g.

    <DataTemplate x:Key="clientDetails">
        <ContentPresenter x:Name="clientDetailsPresenter"
   ContentTemplate="{StaticResource clientSummary}"
   Content="{TemplateBinding Content}" />

        <DataTemplate.Triggers>
            <DataTrigger Binding="{BindingClient.TFN}"Value="{x:Null}">
                <SetterTargetName="clientDetailsPresenter"
           Property="ContentTemplate"
           Value="{StaticResource clientFullDetails}" />
            DataTrigger>
        DataTemplate.Triggers>

    DataTemplate>

The other spot I find this really useful is showing different data in a list when the item is Selected.

Technorati Tags: WPF,DataTemplate,DataTrigger