An introduction to MapPoint?

[Adam M]

Hello, I'ma junior programmer at a technology company and I've been asked to
do some research for a new feature planned for one of our products (a desktop
app written in C#). One of the things this product does is collect clients'
street address information, and the feature we're looking at implementing
will have to involve fetching the longitude and latitude value for these
street addresses. A map to preview where exactly the retrieved long & lat
values point to may be desirable, but at the moment I'm just interested in
the geocoding side of things. I'm a good programmer but an inexperienced one,
and I have so many questions about doing this that I don't know where to
start.

Can I use the MapPoint web service to fetch this information?

Do I have to sign up for and/or pay to get access to the MapPoint web
service?

Ideally what I'd like is to throw a street address (or multiple street
addresses) at the webservice (eg "123 Fake Street, Suburb, Country") and
getback some coordinates ("123E, 45S"). Is it that simple?

On a more general note, I've never programmed using web services before, it
it safe to assume that the .NET framework makes accessing web services easy?

How do I access the MapPoint web service from my program? Can anyone direct
me to a set of clear instructions on how to do this? Cuz I haven't yet found
any instructions that explain how do to this from the very beginning.

Thanks for helping out a noob ;-)

[Derek Chan]

Adam,

Using web services (especially Mappoint WS) is very easy in .NET thanks to
the abstraction of the magical "Add Web References" button so that all the
grunt work is done for you behind the scenes. You'll need a developer
(Trial) account and a good read through the MSDN for starters:

https://mappoint-css.live.com/mwssignup/Default.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa492550.aspx

Hope that helps,
--
Infusion Development
http://www.infusion.com

Post by Adam M
Hello, I'ma junior programmer at a technology company and I've been asked to
do some research for a new feature planned for one of our products (a desktop
app written in C#). One of the things this product does is collect clients'
street address information, and the feature we're looking at implementing
will have to involve fetching the longitude and latitude value for these
street addresses. A map to preview where exactly the retrieved long & lat
values point to may be desirable, but at the moment I'm just interested in
the geocoding side of things. I'm a good programmer but an inexperienced one,
and I have so many questions about doing this that I don't know where to
start.
Can I use the MapPoint web service to fetch this information?
Do I have to sign up for and/or pay to get access to the MapPoint web
service?
Ideally what I'd like is to throw a street address (or multiple street
addresses) at the webservice (eg "123 Fake Street, Suburb, Country") and
getback some coordinates ("123E, 45S"). Is it that simple?
On a more general note, I've never programmed using web services before, it
it safe to assume that the .NET framework makes accessing web services easy?
How do I access the MapPoint web service from my program? Can anyone direct
me to a set of clear instructions on how to do this? Cuz I haven't yet found
any instructions that explain how do to this from the very beginning.
Thanks for helping out a noob ;-)