Hi,
what we did about current position was fooling TTN with GPS driver support (ExternalGPS).
The idea - I find the starting location (Geocode functions) and then build a GPS signal which simulates a starting position on that place.
After some feeding time (check via GetCurrentPos..) you can ask TTN to build a route.
---By the way - the example assumed that Linz is curpos.
About the text summary - with the GetRouteCoodrinates combined by subsequent calls to GetLocationInfo(Ex) you can build a list of "waypoints" with data.
BUT - you will get no driving instructions from that.
TTN is not a tool for planing or such things - it is a tool to guide you from A to B.
Of course you have (directöy in TTN) some methods to get information (like Browse as text or Route summary) but unfortunately these things are not available through the SDK.
By the way - we also tried to use TTN to find an opimized route from A to B, C, ...
The well known "travelling salesman problem" - we know there is no real solution for this but you can achive (as long as there are limited destinations) a solution via "brute force" which means check all possible combinations.
With TTN you have to reduce the above statement to "VERY limited destinations".
So we decided to use an other tool for such things. A fact is (due to the system we build it is obligatory) that you need an online connection for our approach.
What we use are Microsoft MapPoint Webservices.
Those services offer a lot of great things (like optimized routes and so on) and offer "fine grain parameters" (shortest, fastest, ......) as well as "avoid areas" and so on.
So what we do - we call this service to solve our "travelling salesman problem" and than use the results to build (like told above) our destination list.
If a comparrison between the MP results and the route TTN offers tells us that TTN did it much more worse we can use the waypoints of MP to build a "hop by hop route".
Assume MP tells us it is best to drive Linz, Freistadt, Amstetten, Melk, Wien, Linz for a roundtrip.
--Assume further we are in Linz (start and end).
We tell TTN to route us to Freistadt - and find out that the TTN route lasts more than 20% longer as the MP route.
We than take the first waypoint from MP and tell TTN to route there.
We frequently check the RouteInformation and when we are very near (a few hundred meters) to the waypoint we plan another route - to the next waypoint.
Another approach would be to check (at every waypoint) if TTN uses now the "good route" BUT this results in a massive "screen flicker" due to the "Checking Routes built inbetween".
So we decided - if we have to use "hop to hop" we do this very consequent till we reach the destination.
Since MP Webservices offer a lot of other capabilities we need (draw tracks on client apps or websites) we need it simply for the destop (web) part of our app.
This was our entry to MPWS - just the need to have maps on our desktop (web) apps without the need (and limitations) of client software (Like MapPoint 200x).
And since we allready used this techno it was a litle step to use it also on the PDA.
Our finall solution is that - PPC calls our server - Server calls MPWS and checks the results - Server transfers results to PDA.
Regards
Manfred