MapQuest Devblog

We are pleased to announce the release of version 5.3 of the MapQuest Platform! This update focuses on enhancements to our 3 client-side APIs: JavaScript, AS3, and FUJAX.

Some of the big changes include:

• Collections: Support for multiple and remote collections (KML and GeoRSS); easier handling of shape collections
• Custom Tile Layer support
• Add real-time traffic to your map
• Globe view enhancements
• All 3rd party JavaScript libraries removed (decreases JS footprint)

For the server-side APIs, .NET works with 2.0 and 3.5 on 32 and 64-bit; C++ now has been upgraded to support Visual Studio 2008 and 32 and 64-bit libraries are available.

Here's the full list of release notes:

In my last post we saw that using the MapQuest NET API version 5.3 in an ASP.NET web application was not all that much harder than using it in a winforms application. Now in order to easily reuse some of the code it would be nice to create an ASP.NET custom control which displays a map just based on an origin and a destination.

Where Open Voice meets Geocoding

Geocoding is hot. "Geocoding is the process of assigning geographic identifiers (e.g., codes or geographic coordinates expressed as latitude-longitude) to map features and other data records, such as street addresses. You can also geocode media, for example where a picture was taken, IP addresses, and anything that has a geographic component. With geographic coordinates the features can be mapped and entered into Geographic Information Systems" - wikipedia. Using the MapQuest API we can geocode any address in the world. In my recent article on Open Voice I showed how to use C# and .NET to build a Voice over IP phone. I've also been exploring the possibilities of the MapQuest .NET API on my blog. Now wouldn't it be great if those two worlds came together to build a phone that displays the location of the person you're calling? I call it the AIM Map Phone. And it looks like this:

Earlier this week I was thinking, wouldn't it be cool if the MapQuest .NET API would allow me to program all my logic in C# (or VB.NET) and then instead of having it generate a bitmap, have it generate just the URL of a map? The URL can be used in web applications or I can embed the url in an image tag which I send as an email. A whole new world of possibilities opens up. Guess what? Generating an URL for a MapQuest map is part of the API today!

Time to take the MapQuest API 5.3 beta a step further and see how hard it is to embed MapQuest mapping a windows application. As a developer I'm constantly thinking "is this a one time effort? or do I want to reuse this code?". Well for embedding MapQuest into my .NET application I would like to create a reusable component, in fact, I'd like to create a WinForm usercontrol which can be reused in any application simply by dragging and dropping the control onto a form.

So what are the steps to build such a control?

If you're a C# .NET developer and want to get started using the new MapQuest 5.3 API then you can get started today with the beta/release candidate version available on http://developer.mapquest.com/Beta.
Download the .NET library and start exploring.

From a .NET point of view not much has changed (yet) in the 5.3 API:
- The library has been renamed to mapquest20.dll to reflect that this is for .Net 2.0 and above only
- It has been tested with the 2.0 framework AND the 3.5 framework
- It has been tested with both 32-bit and 64-bit environments
- No interface changes have been made