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!
Friedl
