MapForums

Introduction

Tracking applications are increasingly popular. People appear to track everything: their vehicles, their employees, their children and even their pets. There are plenty of such applications which use Virtual Earth. Most of these applications are not publicly accessible but there are also some which everybody can access over the web such as iFly.com's Flight Tracker...

...or BCFerries

We also find more and more GPS-enabled devices and there is an increasing trend of using these devices to track not just vehicles but also outdoor activities, expeditions or bicycle-races or to map your own position, so that your friends and family know where you are. Particularly with more and more social networks popping up there will certainly be many more use cases.

The following sample is addressing these kind of scenarios and I will demonstrate how you can relatively easy create a basic tracking application. Please keep in mind, that this sample is just meant to be demo. It is not secure and there is plenty of room for improvement but it shows the basic principle.

The Idea

On the mobile device, we want to capture the location via GPS and either display the results, store them in a local SQL Server Compact Edition or send them to a remote SQL Server. For the latter we will create a HTTP request to a web service or Generic Web Handler which creates and executes an INSERT-Statement on behalf of the mobile device. This is just for simplicity of this sample. In a real-live application you would probably want to set up something like remote SQL via the 'SQL Server Web Synchronisation Agent' or an IP-channel communication.

The web application to display the track is in our sample a HTML-Document with some JavaScript-code to display the map and create an AJAX-call to a web service which retrieves and updates the data from our database in a pre-defined interval.

What we need