Mapping Social Services with Bing Maps, SQL Server 2008 and ASP.NET

Well I gave my first presentation at the Regional GIS Meeting last Thursday at the new Tarrant County College Trinity River Campus (wow) and it was great to hear that people are as excited about SQL Server 2008 as I am.  I was planning on posting detailed information on the architecture of this application, but I've decided to hold off until it is a little closer to completion, since quite a bit could change between now and then.

You can view the demo application at http://onestar.dfwmaps.com/ but remember that this is just a demonstration and should not be used for any decision-making. 

Just a few brief points that I'll elaborate on later:

• We're using the Bing Maps for Enterprise (formerly Virtual Earth) as our mapping API and pulling points and shapes out of SQL Server 2008 formatted as GeoRSS.  We borrowed this approach from Johannes Kebeck.
• If you turn on the 'Show Service Areas' option, the shapes that you will see for points with this attribute are creating by iterating through each geography and using the STUnion SQL 2008 function to merge each polygon with the previous.  This is occurring on-the-fly and I never cease to be amazed at the performance.
• The boundary tiles are hosted by us using ArcGIS Server, but the demographics layers are being pulled in from ArcGIS Online, as ESRI recently converted many of their free map services to Web Mercator (scroll down to the Web Mercator Maps section) and the right tiling scheme for overlaying data in Bing, Google, et al.  So now you can mashup very up-to-date demographics data into your web maps for free!
• The autocomplete functionality you will discover when typing in the 'Zoom to location' and 'Enter a provider type' fields is powered by the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and is a great way of increasing user-friendliness and controlling user input.
• To control the number of points displayed on the map, we're using a sleek server-side clustering algorithm created by Scott Rae that I'll shed more light on at a later date.