Month: October 2011

Reuse in action: Bing Maps REST API and Community Megaphone

I am a fan of small changes that open up big opportunities. I’m also a fan of reuse, and leveraging code in multiple apps or scenarios. And those of you who’ve known or read my blog for any length of time also know that I’m fond of talking about Community Megaphone, which is my current case in point for reuse.

Overview

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a project which will remain secret for now, but which will be revealed early next year. During the course of this project, I was doing some work with geolocation and mapping, specifically building a list of maps for items from the Community Megaphone OData feed. In my initial experiments, I was rendering the maps using the Bing Maps JavaScript API, and I quickly realized that rendering dozens of interactive maps was not conducive to good performance, and practically speaking, wasn’t necessary to give the user the information I was looking to provide.

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Are you a Gadgeteer?

In a recent post, I mentioned that last week I received a very cool package, the GHI FEZ Spider .NET Gadgeteer Starter Kit. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to take the kit with me to Roanoke, but I did record an unboxing video last week.

The Unboxing


(note to self…need to get a macro lens for my video camera…sorry for the focus issues)

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Kinect Resources and News

Last week, it was my pleasure to present at the Roanoke .NET User Group on the Kinect SDK for Windows beta. In the presentation, I demonstrated the application I created for last summer’s Mid Atlantic Developer Expo, which used the Kinect to provide both skeletal tracking to move the mouse and select items, and also used speech recognition for easier access to items on the page. The application also demonstrated interoperation between the WPF host application, which handled speech recognition via Kinect, and a client web page, which used a nifty JavaScript library called isotope.js to provide snazzy animations and sorting/filtering. You can read more about that project, and view a video demo here.

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