Moving Forwards: Geolocation

Recently I open-sourced a number of Compact Framework projects and when I was working on re-writing an application which used them as a Windows Runtime app I started to think about how much of the code might be useful for app projects. Obviously the API surface for Windows Runtime is totally different to the .NET Compact Framework. In some cases functionality which I wrote is built into the runtime, in other cases I’d made use of P/Invoke to call native APIs which is not an option. However one thing I noticed was that the Windows.Devices.Geolocation namespace which supersedes System.Device.Location was missing one key feature – a built in method to determine the distance between two points. Since I had code for this which was using the same method as the .NET framework I thought this was a prime candidate for migration.

The Windows Runtime is a rather more complex API and whereas .NET had a single GeoCoordinate type the runtime has BasicGeoposition (containing raw latitude, longitude etc) and a number of other types – Geocoodinate, Geocircle, Geopoint etc I decided to first implement an extension method which would work with two BasicGeopositions and then as a helper added an extension method for Geocoordinate which used the logic from the first.

The methods now live in a new NuGet package currently supporting Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 – Charming Geolocation and the code will be available in the Charming project. Just add:-

using InTheHand.Devices.Geolocation;

and you can use the GetDistanceTo methods.

Part of the project using this code required an iOS implementation too for which I’ve used Xamarin. Anyone who has used this will know that while the location functionality is similar to what we are familiar with on Windows the API is significantly different. Because I wanted to fix that just the once too I wrote a wrapper API to expose the Windows API wrapping all the CoreLocation stuff. I’ll be adding this library to the NuGet package shortly and am also in the process of moving all the Charming code from CodePlex to GitHub too.