email: ceberhardt@scottlogic.co.uk
UPDATE: I have published an article on codeproject “Exploring Reactive Extensions (Rx) through Twitter and Bing Maps Mashups“, which has the full sourcecode for this mashup.
A week ago a colleague of mine posted an interesting article on parallelism in .NET 4.0 which included a few different libraries for asynchronous / parallel processing. Being a bit of a Linq fan, the Reactive Extensions jumped out at me.
With the heavy snow in the UK, I was inspired to have a go at creating a Silverlight version of Ben Marsh’s UKSnow twitter / maps mashup.
The application below gives a real-time view of the snow across the UK. To add a snow report to the map, tweet #uksnow with your postcode and the amount of snowfall out of ten (e.g. 7/10).
The application above uses Rx to coordinate requests to the Twitter and Bing maps REST APIs, with the tweets being parsed to extract the postcode, which is then geocoded via bing. Snow is added to the map with an opacity based on the amount (out of ten) in the given tweet.
If it has stopped snowing when you look at the map above, this is what it looked like at around midday today (12:00 GMT, 29th November, 2010):
I plan to write a codeproject article on Rx with a few other examples, however I just couldn’t wait to put this online because the example is much more powerful when it is actually snowing!
Regards,
Colin E.
Is there a way to have an embed map of bing using the bird’s eye view but zoomed out? The default zoom is too close and can’t really show the whole neighborhood.
Sorry – I don’t think you get Bird’s Eye view in the Silverlight control.
Hi,
Great app!! Love it.
I’m a bit of a novice so this question may be a bit silly, but can this be embeded into WordPress at all? Would be great to use this for our readers when the snow threatens.
Shelley
xx
Yes, it can be embedded in WordPress, I would be happy for you to use it if you provide some kind of credit and a link back to this site. Perhaps send me an email if you want to discuss? ceberhardt@scottlogic.co.uk
[...] Christmas Eve and time for some fun! A few weeks back I published an article on Reactive Extensions where I created a Bing Maps / Twitter mashup that plotted the geolocation of #uksnow twitter tags. [...]
Just getting into RX with WebRequests so I’m really looking forward to seeing how you’ve implemented this!
Thanks Steven,
Sourcecode available here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/ExploringRx.aspx
[...] UKSnow Silverlight – An Rx powered Twitter, Bing Maps mashup – I, like many others in the UK, woke to a covering of snow this morning, and Colin Eberhardt here highlights his Silverlight port of the #UKSnow application which uses Silverlight, Bing Maps, the Reactive Extensions and Twitter to create a useful (and timely) mashup. [...]
Very cool visualization, also looking forward to the source code! And now I know why everyone was using the #uksnow [postcode] X/10 abbreviation on Twitter
Love it! Can’t wait to see the code. Is it a 1-liner?
Thanks Johnny, Rx did help quite a bit – the whole app is a single Observable ‘pipeline’, however I do have a few other methods invoked via ‘Do’. I could put it all one one line if I wanted
UKSnow Silverlight – An Rx powered Twitter, Bing Maps mashup. | Colin Eberhardt’s Adventures in WPF…
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