Adding airport locations to VirtualEarth, Part 1
I am playing with the Virtual Earth Silverlight control, and I wondered how hard it would be to make a quick application that could record my flights around the world?
It turns out the major task is getting a decent list of airport codes with locations! These guys from Holland have a really comprehensive list of airports in a CSV file that I converted to XML and included in my Silverlight project.
(I considered using a WCF service to provide my airports from a DB, but how many new airports are there exactly in these economic times? Instead I embedded the 6K file in the Silverlight app)
I used LinQ to create a pin in a seperate layer on top of the map and here is the result:
Way too many airports in this world
Having 6000+ pins in your map is not great for responsiveness, and anyway you can’t find your desired airport anyhow ^-^
What is the answer? I think some smarter rendering of layers.. that is the challenge for the next post
