Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5 Creating a GIS application in
.NET
So finally we come to the part most of you have been waiting for: the creation of a small GIS-
enabled desktop application in .NET.
In this chapter I use Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate for any screenshots, and my code is in C#.
For anyone who has used any of the Microsoft .NET languages and editors, it shouldn't be
much of a problem for you to adapt what I show here to the environment you are working in.
Downloading SharpMap
Before we do anything, we need to download SharpMap; it is the GIS framework we'll be
using. Since SharpMap is currently undergoing a lot of changes and general refactoring, it's
better to download the source files from SVN and compile your own version than it is to use
the pre-compiled downloads.
In your browser, navigate to
http://sharpmap.codeplex.com/
and click the
Source Code
tab.
Click
Download
to get the latest changeset as a zip file—it's approximately 180 MB. Or you
can click
Connect
to get the addresses to connect to either the TFS or SVN repositories
using regular clients.
Once you have the sources synced or unpacked onto your hard drive, start Visual Studio,
open the
trunk
folder, and open the
SharpMap.sln
solution.
Once everything is loaded, the
Solution Explorer
should appear as it does in the following
screenshot:
