I had to take a break yesterday afternoon to catch up on my physical exercise and then had to help my daughter with her senior class project on Hamlet. I know there are many people who love Shakespeare, but I am not one of them as it is absolute torture to read his stuff. It is not the content because that is absolutely amazing but it is a language issue. It might appear to be English but it is not what I speak or read. The only way I could help her was to use the Sparknotes version that shows the original old English on the left and the what they heck it means in today's real English. This is kind of what I have been dealing with so far in the first 12 days as Windows 8 might appear to be a computer platform but it has changed so much that I need Sparknotes to help me out and the equivalent would be the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documentation.
Today I had to send an email to the mapping engine man on a couple of issues I found around Victoria Island at the Canada - USA border above Washington State. Now I am back to finishing off the JSON processing and today I am going to get the some data showing up on a Bing Map as I am not going to sleep until I do!
I think I am finally getting the hang of this. I can find the C# class or XAML documentation I need. Most of the time I can write the C# code I need to handle strings or doubles or JSON without looking up what I need. One thing I have not tried is to locate the documentation within VSE itself as I normally use Safari on my Mac. I also use my Mac in case I find something interest so I can save it in this blog easily. Yesterday I had to go back to my blog posts three times looking for information that I knew I had encountered previously but could not recall where I found it. It may take extra time to blog but it helping me as I am a Windows 8 team of one.
I am getting the hang of this - I have all of the JSON being parsed and it is only 9 am. Sounds like it is going to be geographic mapping for the rest of the day. These were very useful in setting default empty values for doubles and dates to differentiate between empty and valid values. It took me 2 more hours to validating that I was processing all of the data correctly. The way I finished this that was to read the JSON data asynchronously, processing the data and store into DAO objects and then implement a ToString method that takes the DAO objects and output JSON. The beauty of this method is that I have the whole round trip tested manually at least. Now I am 100% confident that adding the data to a Bing Map will work as everything is GPS coordinates. It is time to re-login into the Bing Maps Portal to learn about the API...
At 1pm in the afternoon I saw my push pins on a Bing Map. There are several keys to success. The first thing is figuring out what classes exist in a Windows Store app. If the class is not listed on under the Windows API reference for Windows Store apps, then forget about it as it will not exist or work. The default markers were light blue with a double thick border with text that was nor readable in the markers. The real ticket was learning how to create Bing MapLayer and then place a bunch of Bing Map Pushpins on the layer. The real beauty of the documentation is that is shows how to add a tap event to the push pin to show more information which is exactly what I need to do. Now I know exactly how to put all of the data on a map as I will create a second layer tomorrow for the rest of the data.
I am going to call it a day and attempt to exercise for two days in a row.
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