WPdev for beginners

The Windows Phone 7 is equipped with a GPS interface and couples that with the Windows Phone Location Service API within the .NET Framework class library. It can be used to determine the Latitude and Longitude for the application run on a Windows Phone device. It can be used for some pretty creative purposes.

As a matter of fact there are some companies that use Geo Location, e.g. that big coffee chain from Seattle (not mentioning the name here), allowing “check-ins”.

I am going to have a look at how this works. Unfortunately, since the Windows Phone Location Service API relies on a phone’s physical hardware for the GPS, and I, in this example, will only work with the emulator, I might not get a completely satisfying result, But I am going to try it anyway.

I am going to try and retrieve the current location of the phone, or in this case the emulator, through the Windows Phone Location Service API. At least I am going to show the approach how it can be done. I am going to use the Latitude and Longitude of a specific location, if indeed the application is running in an emulator as opposed to a physical device someday.

Then I am going to call a Web Service that will allocate the Latitude and the Longitude to a city, state and country.

A Web Service is just like a method that runs over the internet. Somebody hosts a Web Service and exposes the code block’s name (in a sense), what parameters are accepted and what it will return back. I can call that over the internet and then retrieve the result back and do something meaningful with it.

I create a new project with just a textblock, where I clear out the content, and a button where I change the content to “Find Me”:

I am just going to double click the “Find Me” button to get to the click event in my C# code.

The first thing I need to do is to get access to the Windows Phone Location Service API, which I currently don’t have. I don’t, because the way that .NET Framework class library is built, it is split up into a number of different dll files or assembly files. The reason for that is that I don’t have to load more of the library than I actually need. With so many classes available it would make it so overweight to keep it all in one place and make it all available at the same time. So, all I need to do is just to pick and choose all the pieces that I need, and include that particular dll file into my project.

If I open up the References folder, I can see all the dll files that are there already:

Those dll files have been automatically added when I created the new project. The template would add these. It kind of knew I would need some of those features in almost every application I build.

This is the first time that I’ve come across a feature that doesn’t fit inside one of these dll files. I am going to have to add a reference to that:

I now can see it in the list of dll files. Now I have to add a little using statement:

Now I should be able to add some code inside my button click event:

So, I either retrieve the latitude and longitude on the phone device. If I am not running the application on a physical device, but on the emulator, then I have defaulted it to a specific value, so that I get some satisfaction by running this example.

Now, that I have that location information I need to send it off to a Web Service in order to determine the city, state and country of either the retrieved latitude and longitude or the default value.

Again, a Web Service is like a method that communicates over the internet, usually over port 80 or rather over http, just like the rest of the internet.

The conversation between my client application and the web server that hosts the Web Service is in an XML format called SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). Fortunately I don’t  directly have to deal with the XML, rather the SOAP message. Visual Studio and the .NET Framework will hide those from me, so that I can work with the Web Service as if it were any other class or method in the .NET Framework class library. This is called a proxy class.

The proxy class is created, based on the information that Visual Studio initially retrieves from the Web Service’s definition the first time I try to connect to the Web Service using Visual Studio. The proxy class then handles all of the little details of working with that Web Service, so that I don’t have to.

Here you can find some Information about the Web Service I am going to use. I am choosing MSR MapsService WSDL, then there opens up a page with a list of all the methods that belong to that class. I need that Url : http://msrmaps.com/TerraService2.asmx.

Ok, now I right click on my project name in the properties window and add a Service Reference:

A window is going to pop up where I have to paste in that copied Url and then click on “Go”:

Now it is looking over the internet to find that Web Service and everything that belongs to it:

Eventually I rename that namespace to something friendlier. When I then click the OK button, Visual Studio is building that proxy class that I can access from that point on.

Now, I have to admit, at this point I ran into some trouble. I just kept getting some error messages, so I repeated the step of adding the Service Reference a few times. Nothing worked. I even started the whole project again from scratch. That didn’t change anything. I still kept getting those errors. Then I closed down Visual Studio, opened it up again, and added the Service Reference again. That did the trick. I am wondering if it was a bug in Visual Studio, or if it was my pc. Or was it my lack of knowledge? Anyway, if any of you want to try my example and you run into some trouble, then try to close and reopen Visual Studio.

Ok, let’s move on:

I am creating a reference to a “client” object. I am going to need to make what is called an asynchronous call. When I make a call over the internet it might take a long time, depending on the time of the day or if the user is going to make that call with the phone and has a bad connection. So, what happens while the application is waiting?

The phone is basically locked out of taking additional actions. Therefore in Silverlight, I can call some Web Services asynchronously, meaning that I listen for the event that fires once the application receives back the response from the Web Service, if it ever receives it back. Meanwhile then the application is free, and the phone is free to continue on working until that event happens. So, once I’ve told Silverlight that I am listening for the response in an event that I am going to create, then I am free to call the Web Service. It’s a two step process. I am going to send out the request, and while I go on doing what I want to do, at some point the response will be retrieved. In other words, the phone will not lock down while waiting for the response, it will continue to operate.

Fortunately again, Visual Studio makes this very easy. It creates an event that will handle the asynchronous call.

There is an event handler called “ConvertLonLatPtToNearestPlaceCompleted”. This is what I do:

When I type in “+=”, there pops up a bubble that’s going to create that new event handler by hitting the tab key twice:

Visual Studio is generating that event handler that is fired off whenever that event happens. It also threw in an exception. I don’t think I am going to need that exception, so I comment that out and add add this line of code there:

So far, so good. I have set everything up, but I have not really called the Web Service, yet.

Let’s do that. I am going to add this code inside the button click event handler:

What’s going to happen is that I am going to pass in the default Latitude and Longitude values in the creation of a new object of type LonLatPt. It’s what is reqired by this Web Service “ConvertLonLatPtToNearestPlaceAsync” in order to begin the asynchronous call to the Web Service.

Ok, let’s run it:

Well, the only issue seems to be that my default Latitude and Longitude values seem to be incorrect. I expected it to be Amsterdam, but it is close enough. This will do.

Of course, to run this application on a physical device, I need to make sure to have a data connection.

One more thing: I am looking forward to the release of the new Mango tools. I just read that with them I can test this application even better in the emulator.

So, I am pretty sure that there will be other blog entries about this topic.

To be continued…