Clint Batman's Blog

Well today I'm manning the booth at the Kansas City Visual Studio 2005 Dev Con conference.  It's always nice to get out of the office and actually talk to .NET developers in person. 

So far today we have had a good response from the developers that have stopped by and checked out our .NET mapping controls and other products from ThinkGeo.  It's always hard to convey exactly what our product does in a few brief moments but showing the sample applications that come with the evaluation download seems to work the best.  The lunch break is just about to start so I better go, if anyone is reading this from Dev Con stop by and say hi.

If you have ever wanted to put a geographic map into a SQL Reporting Services report this is the article for you.  I wrote this article a while back but thought it might be prudent to share it on my blog since I talk to people all the time who want to do this type of thing.  Having a map can really give you a great visual tool to analyze your custom data within a geographic area.

I titled the article Integrating Map Suite with SQL Reporting Services, in hindsight I probably should have picked some different data to base the map on since many of the states don't change color when you choose a different display option.  However if you watch Oregon you will notice that it changes between Medium and High shading when “Total Sales Amt”is chosen versus  the “Number of Orders“ as the display option.  All of the data in the report is based upon the AdventureWorks2000 database that is optionally installed with SQL Reporting Services, if you want to play around with the report or build your own map you can download all the .NET source code.

First of all a big thanks goes out to Jeff Julian & John Alexander for telling me about geekswithblogs.net at DevCon in St Louis!

Let me introduce myself since this is my first blog post to geekswithblogs.net.  My name is Clint Batman and I am a principal in a company called ThinkGeo.  Our company provides .NET mapping controls/components that allow developers to easily build mapping functionality into their software applications.  I didn't want to bore everyone with a hello world or first post blog entry so I will try and make this post and all of my posts as interesting as possible.

The main reason I decided to blog is because I talk to .NET developers every day who have never even thought about adding mapping functionality to their applications and have no idea on how to get started.  Since I'm in the mapping software business it's always fun to talk to people about their business needs and explain how mapping might fit in. 

Our two flag ship products Map Suite Winforms & Webforms allow you to build mapping applications targeting either Windows or Web Applications.  We provide a fully functional evaluation version with over 35+ sample applications with C# and VB.Net source code included.  You can also check out several of our GIS online demos and play around with the maps interactively.  We also have a very active Map Suite discussion forums section on our web site where you can post any questions or comments.