Using the GeoCoordinateReactiveService

Having created an Rx wrapper over the GeoCoordinateWatcher on a previous post, in this post I’ll demonstrate how it can be used in a simple application.

The application will display the status of the service, the position and the distance traveled.

For this simple application the service will be exposed as a singleton property of the App class:

public partial class App : Application
{
    // ...

    public static IGeoCoordinateReactiveService GeoCoordinateService { get; private set; }

    public App()
    {
        // ...

        InitializePhoneApplication();

        // ...
    }

    // ...

    private void InitializePhoneApplication()
    {
        // ...

        GeoCoordinateService = new GeoCoordinateReactiveService();

        // ...

    }

    // ...

}

Getting the status of the service is very simple. It just requires subscribing to the StatusObservable. Since we want to display the status, we need to observe it on the dispatcher before:

App.GeoCoordinateService.StatusObservable
    .ObserveOnDispatcher()
    .Subscribe(this.OnStatusChanged);

For the position we do the same with the PositionObservable:

App.GeoCoordinateService.PositionObservable
    .ObserveOnDispatcher()
    .Subscribe(this.OnPositionChanged);

The distance traveled would seem a bit more complicated because we need to keep track of the last position and calculate the distance traveled on every position change. But this is where the Rx excels with its query operators. If we combine the position observable with the position observable having skipped one position with the zip operator we end up with an observable with the current and previous position. And if we apply a selector, we get the traveled distance:

App.GeoCoordinateService.PositionObservable
    .Zip(
        App.GeoCoordinateService.PositionObservable.Skip(1),
        (p1, p2) => p1.Location.GetDistanceTo(p2.Location))
    .ObserveOnDispatcher()
    .Subscribe(this.OnDistanceChanged);

You can find the complete implementation of the service and application here.

Resources:

• Implementing the GeoCoordinateWatcher As A Reactive Service on MSDN Gallery
• The Reactive Extensions (Rx)... on MSDN
• Rx (Reactive Extensions) on CodePlex
• NuGet Pakages
  • Reactive Extensions - Interfaces Library
  • Reactive Extensions - Core Library
  • Reactive Extensions - Query Library
  • Reactive Extensions - Platform Services Library
  • Reactive Extensions - Main Library
  • Reactive Extensions - XAML Support Library
  • Reactive Extensions - Silverlight Helpers
• Using Rx
• Reactive Extensions (Rx) Forum
• Reactive Extensions Team Blog
• MS Open Tech Open Sources Rx (Reactive Extensions) – a Cure for Asynchronous Data Streams in Cloud Programming