I'm in the middle of writing a project that is web driven, and part of the application will be a data logging exercise carried out by our team of guards. What I need to know is : Is there any way to write the WAP page to poll the phone's GPS system for a location, and pass that up in to one of the database fields? I don't mind if we have to stick to a particular brand of phone, i.e. Nokia.
You might like to take a look at: Silver GPS
Abstract:
How to create an end-to-end Mobile GPS tracking application using the .NET Compact Framework, WCF, LINQ, Silverlight, Deep Zoom, and Virtual Earth.
Inspired by a true-story mobility case study recently published on the Microsoft.com website, this session will walk you through how to create a mobile GPS tracking application using the .NET Compact Framework, Windows Mobile SDK, and Compact SQL.
At the Web host layer, we will create a Windows Communication Foundation service and generate a Compact framework client proxy to send the GPS tracks to a host web server - where finally, the GPS trail can then be viewed using LINQ, Silverlight, Deep Zoom, and Virtual Earth.
Includes all source code.
Probably not.
You could write a tiny J2ME application that transmits the coordinates over HTTP; most modern phones that support GPS also support JSR179 Location API that makes it quite simple.
Related
i'm about to decide on technology choices for an agent based application used in the transportaion systems domain.
basically there will be a central system hosting the backend, and multiple agents located across town (installed on desktops) that communicate with devices/kiosks collecting data and then transmitting them back to the central server. the central server could also be hosted on the cloud.
following are important
securing the data and communications between the device and the agent
and the agent and central server.
agents should be easily installable with little or no configuration.
near 100% uptime and availability
Does WCF fit the bill here?
if so what binding types should i go for? netTCP or wsHttp with SSL/HTTPS?
WCF is definitely a fit choice for this kind of scenario. For your bindings, the actual question is what technology you are going to use. Do you want to make the agents run in a non .NET environment like Java, then you should chose for wsHttpBinding. This binding communicates through SOAP and is very interoperable.
If you chose to use .NET agents, you might as well use netTcpBinding because they use the same WCF frameworks. It also supports binary encoding. If you really need to make a choice, take a look at the MSDN Documentation.
For your agents you could use a simple console application that runs in the background as a Windows service. WIX can help you with that (install an application as windows service), but thats all I know. WIX can also help you with basic installing and configure everything for you but it has a high learning curve so you might need to invest time in it.
I have a traditional Win32 program which gets some data using WMI (and it cannot be fetched using API available to Metro apps). Now I want to make a tile with part of this information. As I've understood, it's impossible to simply send this data from Win32 program to the Metro application. What's the preferred way to do such thing?
There is no direct app to app communication method. What you want to do can be accomplished in several ways, however. Your Win32 app could write data to a location on the file system that a Metro style has access to. Also, you could synchronize your Win32 app with your Metro style app using the cloud. You need to be careful, however, as this might violate some of the app certification requirements.
If you are simply writing something for yourself (not concerned with publish your app), you might consider taking the functionality that currently have within your desktop app and encapsulating it within a wcf service running on localhost. Metro apps can call wcf services.
One option would be to have your Win32 program create the tile XML and deposit in Windows Azure storage (or really anything accessible via a URI) and then your Windows 8 Store application could subscribe to that tile via a Periodic Notification.
There are some constraints here which may or may not be relevant to your application - like the refresh rate of the tile (discrete periods from 30 minutes to 1 day) and the machine must be connected to the network when the poll from the URL is made.
You might be able to incorporate a background task to do something similar.
I have a local installation of Voxeo's Prophecy platform, and a voice xml application that runs on the voicexml browser of the platform. How can i call the application to listen to the message, without having a sip phone, and without using the voxeo's hosting capability? I just want to call the application at the local installation without using a phone. When i try this from the browser, i just get the xml file containing the dialog.
Why are you trying to start the application without a SIP phone? The developer version of Prophecy comes with a SIP phone that works great for testing and debugging. Are you trying to access the application from a regular telephone or POTS. If that is the case you will need additional hardware, such as a Cisco VoIP Gateway to translate the land-line signal to SIP. There are a number of VoIP Gateways available. Another option is to put Dialogic cards in your server and use a software that translates between SIP and the Dialogic API. If you purchase Prophecy from Voxeo as an appliance there are options they can sell you to achieve this. The advantage of getting this from Voxeo is that they will help configure it, which is not trivial depending upon the type type of telephone lines you are using and whether they are behind a PBX or not.
The telephony/communications interface to Prophecy is SIP so that is the only way to communicate with it. You could use any open source SIP stacks to develop something yourself, but the easiest thing to do is to use a software based SIP phone. It is not like you could just start talking and the VXML app would know what you intended, or if the if the voice input was really intended for the VXML app. You still need to maintain things like sessions and routing to the correct application which is easily handled by a SIP phone. Prophecy is designed for a telephony environment. If you are trying to use it for something like a home automation system, which some people have, I would think you would have to provide some type of SIP front end that is voice activated.
I am in the process of integrating our custom web app with QuickBooks Enterprise 9. My thought is that I could use QuickBooks as my "database" of sorts. When a person creates an invoice, the invoice is actually stored only in QuickBooks. When a person views a list of invoices, they are actually viewing a list of QuickBooks invoices. I want to make sure the data is stored in only one location.
I realize that I could use the QB Web Connector, but the problem with that is I wouldn't have control over when the requests to QB actually get processed (That job is up to the Web Connector).
So I have my web UI to act as the QuickBooks "face," but I don't have any good way to get to and from the QuickBooks file located on an internal server. What I was thinking was that I could create a WCF web service and install it on the QuickBooks server. The web service could then be my integration point. My custom web app could then consume the web service and, viola, I have access to my QuickBooks files.
My question is this: Can a WCF app connect and run QuickBooks? If not, could i create a Windows service to act as my point of integration? If so, can my custom web app "consume" a windows service?
I'll start by warning you that QuickBooks probably isn't your best choice for a reliable back-end database accessible from a remote website. In fact... it's probably a really, really bad choice.
You should have your own application database, and then if you need to also exchange data with QuickBooks, do that outside of the normal lifecycle of your app, as a separate sync process.
QuickBooks generally isn't reliable enough for always-online type of applications due to a number of reasons:
Flaky SDK connections
Updates and single-user mode will
lock you out of accessing QuickBooks
Difficulty in establishing SDK connections from non-GUI processes (Windows Services and IIS processes)
With that said...
Yes, you could create a WCF web service, host it on the QuickBooks machine, and make your WCF web service relay messages to/from QuickBooks.
Yes, you could also create a Windows Service that does the same sort of thing.
Do NOT implement it as a Windows service, and do NOT implement it within IIS - instead implement it as a GUI app that runs alongside QuickBooks.
If you try to implement things as a Windows service or within IIS, the QuickBooks SDK requires you have a GUI available (it users a GUI COM message pump for events dispatching or something like that...) to process requests, so you'll probably need to use something like QBXMLRP2e.exe to straddle the process boundary between QuickBooks and your non-GUI Windows service/IIS. My experience has been that it's a gigantic pain in the butt, and requires mucking with DCOM permissions as well.
I have an example and some documentation on my QuickBooks integration wiki.
The IDN Forums are a good place to ask questions.
My recommendation to you would be to either:
Use the Web Connector and QuickBooks
and give up hope of keeping all of your data in one place. Cache the data in a real database, and update it by querying QuickBooks periodically. I'm almost done building a solution to do exactly this right now, and it works fantastic.
OR
Use a different account system. NetSuite is pretty nice. I'm not sure what else is out there, but if I were you I'd look for something SQL-based or with a strong SOAP/REST API.
Does anyone know of an open source web service/wcf service that can stream media content to clients? In particular I am looking for something that could access my music collection and stream it to a client (could be a client browser, win mobile app or even iphone application).
I guess it would have to be WCF based as I'm not sure that webservices do streaming really well. Also Windows Media Streaming Services is not the best way to go as the service should operate from a vista/xp machine (preferably).
If not, does anyone know the best way to start going about creating something like this - I'm not sure I know where to start with this one, although I can see many many uses for such a service!
Even though it's not open source, Windows Server 2008 has a Streaming Media role that will do what you ask. Of course, you'll need to have a server to put it on.
I tried Orb and it is quite good, apart from the fact that it hijacked my tuner card so media center would no longer work. However I'm going to try and create a home grown version.
Orb (www.orb.com) will stream your media to just about anything with a web browser. I've been running it on an XP virtual machine for about a year. I love being able to stream my entire media collection to my phone while I'm working at a client's site.
While it isn't open source, it is free and relatively well supported. One of the best features is that the architecture is set up so that there are no special requirements for your firewall -- it just works.