C H A P T E R  14

Using Location Services

All Windows Phone devices are required to ship with a GPS receiver. As a result, you can develop applications that are location-aware. The GPS receiver on the Windows Phone device receives the data in the form of longitude and latitude coordinates.

There are many popular applications available for phones these days that use location data, such as restaurant-finder and navigation applications that give driving directions and plot street addresses on a map using services such as Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft Bing Maps. With the Bing Maps service, you can convert an address into GPS coordinates and plot it using the Windows Phone device's Bing Maps Silverlight control.

Also the Windows Phone GPS service offers a variety of useful functions including Windows Phone's search engines take advantage of the phone's GPS by providing relevant search results based on the location of the phone. Another interesting location-based application tracks your location while you are running and, based on the distance you travel, gives you your total calories burned.