Welcome to Map Suite™ Windows Phone Edition from ThinkGeo, a full-featured mapping control that makes it easy for any Microsoft .NET developer to add mapping functionality to a Windows Phone application quickly and efficiently. Using the intuitive object model, even developers inexperienced in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can have fully functional maps working in minutes.

In this article, we will discuss how to install Map Suite Windows Phone Edition 7.0.0.0 on your machine and upgrade your development environment.

At the very beginning, in order to move forward with the installation of Map Suite Windows Phone Edition, you should have the items as following prepared or installed on your machine:

• Windows 8 x86 or x64
• Visual Studio 2012
• Windows Phone SDK 8.0

Please check here for more detailed System requirements for Windows Phone Emulator.

(Note: Installation may take several minutes and is complete when the install dialog box closes.)

Download Map Suite Windows Phone Evaluation Edition, which includes the Map Suite development SDK and “How Do I” samples.

NOTE: : Please make sure you have an Internet connection available while running the Map Suite Windows Phone Edition installer, as it requires online registration to complete successfully.

When you launch the Map Suite Windows Phone Edition installer, you will be presented with a screen that looks like the figure below:

Click “Next”, review the license agreement and then click “I Agree” to proceed. You will then see the installation progress screen:

Once installation is complete, your development environment is ready. You can now begin developing your own mobile GIS projects or explore the available sample apps using Map Suite. Code samples can be found at “[Installation Folder]\ThinkGeo\Map Suite Windows Phone Evaluation Edition 7.0”.

If you have purchased a license for the Map Suite Windows Phone Developer or Complete Edition, you can get the installer package from the ThinkGeo Customer Portal. Let's walk through the installation of the full version of Map Suite Windows Phone Edition now.

Installing the full version of Map Suite Windows Phone Edition will be easiest if your computer has an Internet connection available, as the software will register itself online automatically. When you first launch the Map Suite installer, you will be presented with a screen that looks like the figure below:

Click “Next”, review the license agreement and then click “I Agree” to proceed. On the next step, you will be required to type in your product serial number as assigned to you by ThinkGeo. If the serial number isn't correct, you will be shown a warning message like the one below:

After you type in the correct serial number, please click “Next” to continue installing Map Suite Windows Phone Edition. When installation is complete, you will see this screen:

Warning: If you type in an incorrect or malformed serial number, you will see a dialog box containing the message “The serial number you entered could not be activated. Please contact ThinkGeo to resolve this issue.”

Map Suite Windows Phone Edition can also be installed even when an Internet connection is not available, although additional steps are required. Initially, installation is similar to the online installation process described above. The exception is that, at the end of the installation, the following dialog box will appear:

The dialog box provides two options.

• If you answer Yes, you will be presented with the Map Suite Registration Builder, with which you can register your copy of Map Suite manually.
• If you answer No, Map Suite will be installed without registration information and will operate in evaluation mode. This means you will see an “Unlicensed” watermark on your maps.

Click “Yes” to register manually and the Map Suite Registration Builder will display, as shown:

Click the “Generate Request File” button, which will create a special file with a .request extension. You will then need to send that file by email to support@thinkgeo.com with a short description about your installation – for example, your name, company (if applicable), email address, etc. ThinkGeo's support staff will process your request, typically within one business day, and send you back a new file with a .license extension.

Using the .license file, you can activate your Map Suite product manually. Here's how to do this:

1. Launch the Map Suite Registration Builder at “[Installation|Forlder]\ThinkGeo\Map Suite Windows Phone Full Edition 7.0\Miscellaneous\Map Suite Registration Builder” and click the “Import License File” button. Note: Please make sure that you launch the Map Suite Registration Builder using administrator privileges in Windows. If you are using Windows 8, you can do this by right-clicking on the Map Suite Registration Builder shortcut and choosing “Run as administrator”.

2. Select the .license file you received from ThinkGeo and click “Open”. If reading of your .license file was successful, you will see the following message:

As we all know, the WindowsPhone Emulator provided by “WindowsPhone SDK 8” is unable to work with http://localhost/ anymore, in other words, if we would like to make sure the installation samples which are based on ServerLayerOverlay, such as “Quersy Server With Wcf”, “Load a Raster Source” etc., things as following we need to do at first:

1. Open the “How Do I” sample and build with VisualStudio

2. Deploy the “CS HowDoISample.WCF” and “CS HowDoISample.Web” to IIS.

3. In VisualStudio, navigate to the “HowDoISamples\CS HowDoISample\Helper.cs” and change the code as following to the address of the service that we deployed just now:

        private static string connectorAddress = "http://192.168.0.80:8888/GeoTile.axd";
        private static string queryServiceAddress = "http://192.168.0.80:9999/SpatialQuery/SpatialQueryService.svc";
        private static string vehicleTrackingServiceAddress = "http://192.168.0.80:9999/VehicleTracking/VehicleTrackingService.svc";

4. Build and Run the application as normal.

NOTE If we wouldn't like to do the steps mentioned above, another option is that we can use IIS express in Visual Studio, in this way, we need to do more configurations in Visual Studio. Please refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/jj684580(v=vs.105).aspx#BKMK_Settingupprojectstodemonstratetheproblemandthesolution for more detail.

At this time, your development environment is ready. You can now begin developing your own mobile GIS projects or explore the available sample apps using Map Suite. Code samples can be found at “[Installation Folder]\ThinkGeo\Map Suite Windows Phone Full Edition 7.0”.