Bing Maps on Microsoft Surface

Christmas hasn’t started yet but I start it now – with a free piece of software from Siemens. It’s called POIBrowser (“Point Of Interest Browser”) and it’s more than a Bing Maps showcase!

POIBrowser offers Bing Maps on a Surface and lets you quickly navigate to preconfigured Points Of Interest (tourist attractions, subway stations, offices of your company, etc…). For demonstration purposes the default configuration shows a bunch of Siemens offices in Vienna, Austria. However, you can easily put your own targets onto the map and add a thumbnail picture plus text.

After installation check out the Data folder and find the Sites.xml. Each site has a set of properties including the site name, address, description, picture and last but not least the site coordinates!

POIBrowser includes a geocoding module. This module connects to a Microsoft MapPoint Web Service to translate a specified address into coordinates. The geocoding module requires a MapPoint Developer Account which you supply via the POIBrowser.exe.config file. If you don’t have such an account and you don’t want to create one (it’s free!), you have to supply the site coordinates manually for each site. For more details please read the Readme file included in the download package.

Download Siemens POIBrowser here!

Setup your Surface Application

As promised I have uploaded a simple installer example. It’s a Visual Studio 2008 Setup Project.

Download it here.

Problem: Visual Studio 2008 does not allow to disable the setup screen Select Install Folder. Hence someone who runs your setup can change the install location und you can’t avoid it! Changing the install location isn’t a good idea because the installed Surface Shell configuration file (an XML file which tells the Surface Shell where to find the installed application and preview icons) is set to the default install location!

Solution: Check out the Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit Update for Windows Vista. It contains a tool called Orca which allows you to modify the MSI package i.e. disable the Select Install Folder screen and much more customizations!

Have fun!

Surface 1.0 SP1 Upgrade

Finally I did it! Following the official Microsoft Surface 1.0 SP1 Upgrade Instructions (check them out here) the upgrade worked straight forward. No bad suprises, no fatal errors, everything worked perfectly as expected. Before upgrading the Microsoft Surface device, I recommend you to upgrade your own workstation to make your development environment SP1-ready. As it turned out there were compatibility issues in our Surface Applications between the new Drag’n Drop support that ships with the SP1 and our own Drag’n Drop implementation. However, having a developer workstation with a Microsoft Surface 1.0 SP1 SDK installed, such issues should be fixed before the Surface device upgrade to ensure that the upgraded Surface device is instantly ready for action!

In course of the SP1 upgrade and a clean deployment I made MSI installers for each upgraded application. Check back this blog in a few days – I will provide an MSI installer sample project which you can easily adapt for your own Microsoft Surface applications.