NGeo makes it easier for users of geographic data to invoke GeoNames and Yahoo! GeoPlanet / PlaceFinder services. You'll no longer have to write your own GeoNames, GeoPlanet, or PlaceFinder clients. It's developed in ASP.NET 4.0, and uses WCF ServiceModel libraries to deserialize JSON data into Plain Old C# Objects.

using (var geoNamesClient = new NGeo.GeoNames.GeoNamesClient())
{
    var toponym = geoNamesClient.Get(6295630, "demo"); // replace with your own username
    // do something with the data
}

Because each NGeo service comes with a corresponding IConsumeXyz interface, you have always been able to dependency inject client instances and control their lifetimes + disposal semantics. However the IConsumeGeoNames and IConsumeGeoPlanet interfaces contain several overloads that accept either a username or app id for authentication. This means your code had to maintain a separate reference to your geonames username or geoplanet appid, and pass it in as a method parameter. When using inversion of control and dependency injecting IConsumeGeoWhatever instances into your controller, this can be annoying because you have to maintain your auth string in a separate dependency (or worse, hard-code it).

Today there are two new interfaces: IContainGeoNames and IContainGeoPlanet. These are nearly identical to their respective IConsumeGeo predecessors, except that their methods do not contain username or app id parameters. Instead, they expect the implementation class will already know the auth credential. Each class has a default implementation, named GeoNamesContainer and GeoPlanetContainer respectively. Each of these classes has a constructor that accepts a string for your geonames user name or geoplanet app id. You can use them in your IoC container to resolve the auth dependency at runtime. Let's look at an example using SimpleInjector:

//  each time the service is requested, construct a new instance with the auth credential
simpleInjectorContainer.RegisterPerWebRequest<IContainGeoNames>(() =>
    new GeoNamesContainer(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["GeoNamesUserName"]));

simpleInjectorContainer.RegisterPerWebRequest<IContainGeoPlanet>(() =>
    new GeoPlanetContainer(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["GeoPlanetAppId"]));

With that registration, you can do something like this:

public class GeoController : Controller
{
    private readonly IContainGeoNames _geoNames;
    private readonly IContainGeoPlanet _geoPlanet;

    public GeoController(IContainGeoNames geoNames, IContainGeoPlanet geoPlanet)
    {
        _geoNames = geoNames;
        _geoPlanet = geoPlanet;
    }

    public ActionResult DoSomeWork()
    {
        // no auth arg required
        var gnEarth = _geoNames.Get(6295630);
        var gpEarth = _geoPlanet.Place(1);
        return View();
    }
}

The actual GeoNamesContainer and GeoPlanetContainer classes just wrap a respective Client instance along with the auth string passed to the constructor, and delegate all method invocations to the client. So you will always get the same results, the only difference is these new interfaces hide the auth credential from you. (Note a corresponding interface is not necessary for the Yahoo! PlaceFinder services, since it does not (yet) require any auth credentials.)

There are at least 2 other GeoNames clients that I'm aware of, and they are listed on the GeoNames Client Libraries page. This project is very much like the .NET WCF project written by Baretta2 / Myren. I started modifying the Myren.GeoNames.Client project source code because my organization bought premium GeoNames credits, and we needed to invoke a different service URL. Also, since Baretta2's project was published, GeoNames has started requiring a username parameter to be passed to each web service invocation.

But that wasn't enough. We also needed a client for the Yahoo! GeoPlanet API, and to my knowledge, there is not one of these written in .NET. So we rolled our own.

But that still wasn't enough. I also wanted this code to be available as a NuGet package, so that I could use it in multiple projects.

So if you want a NuGet package that can give your app a client for GeoNames, Yahoo! GeoPlanet, and Yahoo! PlaceFinder services, this is the only one I'm aware of.

So far, I've only built out clients for the services I use in my projects. If you would like to contribute to this project instead of building your own, feel free to fork and send me a pull request.

This software is subject to the terms of the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).