Streetview spreads fast

.. but is slow rolling out

Today I jumped up in joy as I could see some house where I used to live in The Netherlands on Google Streetview. I saw the Pier at Holwerd and the house of my sister. All great.

But the house where I live is not there (yet)

Uhm?

Somehow there seem to be some large squares of Streetview missing from the maps. Must be some data issue, I guess. Maybe some more files need to be synced between servers or what.

But why just my area that is missing? Have to wait I guess.

Means more wear and tear for my F5 key.

Looking beyond

Looking a bit beyond the borders of my small nation I see even more interesting things.

• The coverage in Spain is quite extensive and probably on the same level as in The Netherlands. (Once these holes get plugged.)
• Switzerland had some fuss about faces that were still recognizable, but still has some fair amount of Streetview.
• The United Kingdom has Streetview splattered here and there over the map.
• The coverage of France seems to be mainly limited to the Tour de France route that was covered last year.
• Scandinavia is too ... cold? or reluctant? for Streetview
• Italy has the same type of coverage as the United Kingdom
• And the Czech Republic is the only country in Eastern Europe with Streetview

Looking even further beyond

Outside Europe only the The United States in Northern America and Australia, New Zealand and Japan have Streetview presence.

There are still a lot of miles to travel for the Streetview cars and tricycles.

I just wonder if it wouldn't be possible to somehow let the crowd fill the cloud? When enough people take enough pictures that are geolocated accurately enough than that could accumulate to a nice extra input for Google Streetview.

Perfect Pitch

.. for the sake of democracy

Visit this link:
http://adactio.com/journal/1623/

Helping Adactio get that perfect pitch. To nail it, even. You should probably link to his page too, if you’re so inclined to fight DMCA take-downs for the sake of SEO.

uhm

Well, when you have read the article then I do encourage you to create your own link to
http://adactio.com/journal/1623/

Been a bit busy lately

.. again

It's been a busy couple of weeks. The project that I am involved has had another deadline that moved and moved and finally was met. Somehow. One way or another.

All done with the usual fuss of project managers, stake holders en more managers running around asking whether things are finished yet. And now? And now?

You get the picture.

Image via Wikipedia

So, it has been quiet here.

I haven't really had time to progress with my own pet project. Too bad.

And now the second part of the hockey season is back in full swing with my Ladies team once again winning their game, so there's not too much time for fun programming.

Hopefully, soon I will find some time again to make some progress again.

Building an application (4) ...

.. weird debugging problem

One more thing that I have encountered on my wonderful journey in building my first Silverlight application is a debugging issue.

It just not works straight out of the box in Visual Studio 2008. I know, I know, it must be me with all sorts of software loaded or what. Or the missing hotfix 98662654a. But just keeps biting me.

What's up, doc?

I start VS 2008 and make some very very clever changes or just want to try out something. So I set a breakpoint at the right line in the code and hit F5. Easy.

Lots of things happen. The application is built. Well, three applications are built: the Silverlight app, the web app and the web service. So far, so good.

I start my testing and the breakpoints are never hit. At least the IDE does not stop.

And yes, I am running in Debug mode.

What's the cure, doc?

I have found that stopping the debug session (by hitting Shift-F5 in the IDE) and the right-clicking the Web Service project and selecting Debug - Start New Instance does the trick.

Breakpoints are once more hit and they do cause the code to break at those points.

So, what's up, doc?

I honestly can see here that I have no idea. The trick above works for me and to me that is enough.

So, if you come across breakpoints never really breaking than the above trick might work for you.

Building an application (3) ...

.. exchanging and serializing objects

One the interesting things I ran across while building the Trainer Tool was that I had exchange objects between different parts of the system. I have the excercise and its data in a couple of classes and it's the data that's is used in all parts of the system. I store it in my database (in an XML type field). The HttpHandler requests an excercise object through the web service and uses it to generate an image that is shown on the webpage. And so on. Simply said all the blue arrows in the diagram are used to transport an excercise object.

The excercise object

So all the different components need to have access to the defintion of the excercise object. Well, that's easy. Create a separate project, a class library, and simply set references to that from the other projects. Well, almost. It works for the Web Service and the Web Application, but not for the Silverlight project.

Why not? Well simple enough setting a reference to a project copies the compiled assembly (dll) from that project to the referring project's bin folder. And that just will not work with a Silverlight project. Simply because the it's a different type of dll.

The solution is very simple. Since both the .NET parts and the Silverlight files use the same C# (or VB.NET) code you can use the code in both projects.No, do not copy the class files from the .NET class project to the Silverlight! You will be doing all updates twice. It is quite easy to link the files from the class project. Create a folder to link the files into. And then use the context menu to Add Existing items.

In the following file dialog choose the files you need and then notice the small arrow on the add button. That produces a dropdown menu where the option to link the files is hidden.

Now, you have linked the class files. When you open one of the files through either of the projects you are in essence opening the same physical file. In the project explorer you can see the linked files with the little shortcut style arrow, which hints at that behavior. You get a warning when you try to open a file for the second time (once directly and once linked) and that makes perfect sense.

That was all

Another time some more information on how serialization poses some trickery as well.

Image via Wikipedia