From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 13

Today is a brand new day and several things are planned for the day. I need to create some new SVG symbols for my map markers and then added them to my custom font. I then need to get the rest of the data to display on the map with dynamic colors per each marker. I then need to load the latest build for the mapping engine and see if I can get the markers to display on it. I then need to look into buying a 3rd party set of controls from Telerik since they have a dual range slider that may just work out of the box. I downloaded the RadControls demo trial on my Windows laptop and it looks like it will work. I also like their date picker as it looks good and is very similar to the Apple iOS7 date selector.

First thing up is to get the rest of the map markers displaying in different colors. It was easy to put the markers on another layer on the Bing Map. It was a bit of work to get the push pins to be different colors depending on the elevation. I have not gotten custom images on the map yet as that will be my first chore for tomorrow morning. I have my font ready to go but ran out of time to use it. I really want to use the FontIcon class but really wonder if the Bing Map will allow it as a child of a map layer. I may have to use one of the Windows.Graphics.Imaging classes instead and learn how to draw into a bitmap from a font symbol, now that does not really sound like fun.

I also had to learn about formatting doubles since I needed to show some details when a map marker was tapped, but I wanted to show numbers in a reasonable format like "12,345" with the thousands separator. I had to look in two places as the Double.ToString method was a great start and then I found this beauty that lists all of the Standard Numeric Format options. That gave me everything I ever wanted to know about formatting in Windows apps.

Next up is learning how to use LINQ to build dynamic queries in-line as I wanted to show some statistics on the data that was loaded. Before I could use them I had to convert my old school Array code to use a List Generic. Then I directed by a co-worker to the LINQ cheat sheet that just made my day. I was then able to find the count of a couple of properties and the date range of the data that was loaded very easily in just a couple of simple and readable statements.

I did not write down much today but I was so excited when I had all of the data showing up on a Bing Map that I forgot to record what I was doing. The above links definitely describe all of the fun I had today.