This application is part of the author's "30 Days of .NET" initiative to develop 30 mobile applications in 30 days. The source code of the application is included in order to help programmers new to Windows Mobile development write applications in .NET.
Not too long ago Page Brooks and myself made the three and a half hour drive from Florence, SC to Greensboro, NC to attend the Ineta Carolina Community Leadership Summit '08. This was a great event and there we meet a lot of the local Ineta user group leaders. We also meet Andrew Duthie, aka DEvHammer. One issue that rose to the top of things we wanted to work on improving at the leadership summit was awareness of events that are occurring in the local regional area. That's when Andrew told everyone about the project he has been working on: Community Megaphone.
I love have information at my fingertips, so I decided to write a tie-in application.
Basically, this application connects to the Community Megaphone RSS feed and pulls down event data. Then it takes your current GPS position and calculates your distance from each event. Finally, it takes all the events and sorts then so you can find the event that is the closest to you. This is a great application for the traveling .NET geek. Where ever you are you can find great .NET events to attend.
The UI is paying homage to Andrew's Community Megaphone site. I tried to match the basic colors to keep it familiar. The hyperlinks are active and will take you the event's page on Community Megaphone. The menu only has a few options: Refresh, About, and Exit.
An application like this is really exciting, because it is tying the world of mobile together with the world wide web.
These types of mashup applications will continue to take of for years.
Possibilities:
Andrew recently added iCalendar file support to Community Megaphone. This would be a great feature to add to a Windows Mobile application, and it is totally doable. The HTML could be a little more fancy maybe even use a few 16x16 fonts for a little personality.
Requirements:
· .NET Compact Framework