What GPS Dongles work with Windows 7 and the .Net 4.0 System.Device.Location Namespace?

Question

Hi,

I want to add full GPS support into my application. The .Net 4.0 System.Device.Location namespace information here is perfect for my needs. When this was first announced and the Beta release was out, I got a GPS dongle, but I could never get Windows 7 to see it as a sensor and therefore make use of System.Device.Location. After many e-mails to Microsoft they would only confirm that they were using the GPS dongle that comes with a M$ Mapping product..

Does anyone know of any other Dongles that definately will appear as a sensor in Win7? I like the look of this one, it gets good reviews and is a nice size.

Is there anyway of knowing that it will work, for example what Chipsets are supported as a Windows 7 Sensor, a lot of the information out there says that the Win7 implementation is really lacking..

Thanks, M

Answer 1

All devices having proper widows 7 drivers should work.

Answer 2

.net 4.0's Sensor API, under System.Devices is very poorly supported.. Rather than the api actually supporting the main chip providers it appears the main chip providers are going to have to create new drivers specifically for Win7 and the sensor api.. Thanks M$!

The only chip provider that currently appears to have done this is u-blox well done them! But I can't find a dongle very easily that uses their chips..

Instead for my app we have ended up using GPS.Net 3.0 an fully equiped open source implementation available on Codeplex.. Works a treat I tell ye!

Answer 3

Are you developing your software to be shrink-wrapped and deployable by the customer or is your application a fully developed and deployed system? If the later is the case, I would recommend using Franson's GPSGate software.

Their software runs with all GPS devices I have tried. It will even convert many different data formats into standard NMEA data. This will help future proof you against device changes or availability.

Their software can be setup to redirect the data into a virtual serial port, that way all you ever need to access the data is System.IO.SerialPort.

I've used it several times for my applications and have never had any trouble using it.