OpenStreetMap.Net
After I finished some of my projects recently, I found a new project! It doesnt have any use yet but its going to be an OpenStreetMap parser for .Net. Ofcourse there are already OpenStreetMap applications written in .Net but I want to try out some for myself.
First of all, OpenStreetMap files are .osm files with XML markup. As we all know, XML can be pretty big and slow. At first, I thought it would be a nice idea to put all this info in a SQLite database. But after running some test I found out that it was even slower then XML. I searched abit on the internet and decided I could use binary files aswel. I wrote a small binary reader/writer and the 1.5GB XML of The Netherlands is now only 250MB. And its loaded in ~3seconds, depending on the amount of tags.