The last few weeks I have focused on learning Windows Phone 8 Development. GPS location for the phone and services provides nearby it is essential for many apps today. Therefore, I decided to start with GPS tracking and Bing Maps integration.
Address data with zip codes and GPS location is pretty statics in most cases, and it might be a smart to maintain a local database for this information and use Google and Bing services for verifying and updating missing or inaccurate information.
As a result, I found some old data files with Norwegian zip codes. I could not remember the source for the zip codes and GPS positions, so I had to google to find it again. Erik Bolstad has a page where he publish Norwegian zip code data that is pretty accurate.
In addition, I need some international zip code, and found an old reference I have used earlier: geonames.org. This site has loads of zip code data available as CSV format.
I have created a SQL 2012 database with all the tables needed to store the information, and for the time being I just store the Latitude and Longitude for the zip codes, but in future versions of the database I will take advantage of the geography datatype and corresponding T-SQL functions for spatial data.
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