OpenInsight and .net

Several of you have recently asked me about interacting with .net controls, most noteably since OIPI.net (part of OpenInsight version 9.0) was announced and featured at the recent RUG.

I have recently been working on a brand new examples application that will also help to manage my photograph collection (more on that coming soon). Mike Ruane recently called me to share a really kewl feature that they have built for one of their client’s application – it’s now partly in my examples application.

Win Win Solution’s client manages a cemetery somewhere in the USA. Employing a large number of people whose first language is not English was causing some communication issues when needing to maintain a specific grave. Their OpenInsight based application now maintains an image of the grave in the database. However, that’s not the clever part. The digital camera has a GPS add-on, which captures the GPS position of the grave, well really the GPS position of the camera when the picture is taken. This is then used in the application to map exactly where the grave can be found – yes the cemetery’s are huge – and the employee has an image of the memorial or grave stone to confirm that they have the right one.

My examples application does not go quite that far, but Mike has let me have the .net wrapper which exposes the .jpg file header information and displays it in an edit table in my app. Please drop me an email if you wish to explore this further.

With this example, OIPI.net and other .net technologies being written for OI, support for exploiting the .net framework and third party components is looking really good.

Does anyone out there have any OpenInsight interacting with .net success stories to share? Click on comments below to add them to this thread.