{"id":982,"date":"2009-12-28T18:38:41","date_gmt":"2009-12-28T08:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/?p=982"},"modified":"2009-12-28T18:38:41","modified_gmt":"2009-12-28T08:38:41","slug":"more-work-right-o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/2009\/12\/28\/more-work-right-o\/","title":{"rendered":"More Work? Right-o."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The last release of Geon was a kind of forced release from me. You see up until recently I had been using what Microsoft calls a Community Technology Preview (CTP) version of the map control that dominates the center of Geon. When it was initially released there wasn&#8217;t really any timeline around how long it was going to last so I had just assumed that it would work forever (save for the fact that I wouldn&#8217;t get any new features). However this turns out not to be the case as Microsoft so politely informed me a while back:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Valued Bing Maps Silverlight CTP Participant,<\/p>\n<p>Thank you for participating in the CTP &#8211; we are excited to announce that the latest release of the Bing Maps Platform, <strong>including the v1 Silverlight Map Control<\/strong>, is officially here!<\/p>\n<p>Please visit the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bing.com\/community\/blogs\/maps\/archive\/2009\/11\/09\/bing-maps-silverlight-control-1-0-released.aspx\">Bing Maps Blog<\/a> for a full breakdown of the Silverlight Map Control release details.<\/p>\n<p>Important housekeeping details:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"background-color: #888888;\"><span style=\"background-color: #ffff00;\">P<\/span><span style=\"background-color: #ffff00;\"><span style=\"background-color: #ffff00;\">le<\/span>ase note that the CTP control will cease to function at midnight, December 31, 2009.<\/span><\/span> To ensure continued functionality of your CTP applications, please make plans to upgrade to the <a href=\"http:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/library\/ee681900.aspx\">version 1 code<\/a> before that time. For a description of the version 1 changes from the CTP build, please visit the changelist reference in the SDK <a href=\"http:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/library\/ee681889.aspx\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>The Connect site will remain available until December 15th for reference purposes only. Future technical questions\/discussion should be directed to the <a href=\"http:\/\/social.msdn.microsoft.com\/Forums\/en-US\/vemapcontroldev\/threads\">Bing Map Control Development forum<\/a> on MSDN (paid, evaluation and free account types) or to the Bing Enterprise Support Team (paid accounts).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Again, thank you for your participation in the CTP. Your feedback was invaluable improving the code and the overall platform. We look forward to working with you again in the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well that meant 2 things: the first being I was completely wrong, although anyone who&#8217;s used CTP versions of software before will tell you what I thought was total bollocks. The second was that I had to rewrite some of Geon in order to make sure it was compatible with the new version of the plugin, as well as some dastardly new license requirements. I was none too happy to hear about them discontinuing my version and releasing a new one at the same time, but a couple features caught my eye.<\/p>\n<p>On the surface most of it was just a cleanup of the <a href=\"http:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/library\/ee681889.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">code underneath<\/a>. Many of the structs had been replaced with classes and the namespaces had changed to be more inline with Microsoft&#8217;s whole Bing strategy. They also introduced a licensing requirement so I had to get an application key in order to use their control. This isn&#8217;t all bad news since they&#8217;re pretty lax for developers like me who are just starting out, but still pales in comparison to Google&#8217;s (it&#8217;s free but if you&#8217;re making a big app tell us and we&#8217;ll put on extra servers for your app key). I&#8217;ve had it fail to register the key a couple times on me to so hopefully they work this all out in the coming months.<\/p>\n<p>Microsoft also released the <a href=\"http:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/library\/cc981008.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">Bing Web Services SDK<\/a> which has quite a few nice goodies in it. I&#8217;ve got my eye on the Geocode service since I currently use a free service that has been blasted in the past by apps like mine and has subsequently disable access to the free service. Whilst I&#8217;d like to avoid doing that each use of the Geocode service counts against my license key. Since I&#8217;d like to think that one day there will be a fair few people using Geon I&#8217;d like for it to stay usable for as long as possible as I work out the various licensing deals with all the services I&#8217;m using, and spreading the load across 2 services seems like a good bet at the moment.<\/p>\n<p>So it might not have been the nicest of surprises but it did spurr me on to add in 3 more information feeds into Geon which I wouldn&#8217;t of done for a much longer time had I not been forced to work on it. So overall its good that Microsoft gave me the proverbial boot up the bum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The last release of Geon was a kind of forced release from me. You see up until recently I had been using what Microsoft calls&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[421,4],"tags":[793,537],"class_list":["post-982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geon","category-tech","tag-bing-maps","tag-silverlight"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppBqt-fQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}