BasicUsage.md

Basic Usage

There's an excellent introduction and guide to the Kml language available from Google here so be sure to check that out to understand exactly what Kml can do. As mentioned in the tutorial, one of the most common things to do is to create Placemarks, so that's what we'll do here.

First create a new C# console application and add the NuGet package to the project. This can be done with Visual Studio or can be done with the dotnet core tooling from the command line:

dotnet new console
dotnet add package SharpKml.Core

For a simple Placemark we need to know where it should be, so we'll use a Point as follows:

// This will be the location of the Placemark.
var point = new Point
{
    Coordinate = new Vector(-13.163959, -72.545992),
};

This should hopefully be straight forward; the location is stored as a latitude, longitude in the Coordinate property of the Point element. Now we know where the Placemark will be, let's create it and give it a name:

// This is the Element we are going to save to the Kml file.
var placemark = new Placemark
{
    Geometry = point,
    Name = "Machu Picchu",
};

The only thing left to do now is to save it to a Kml file and then we can open it up in a Kml viewer (such as Google Earth). The following will save the Placemark in the application directory in a file called my placemark.kml:

// This allows us to save an Element easily.
KmlFile kml = KmlFile.Create(placemark, false);
using (FileStream stream = File.Create("my placemark.kml"))
{
    kml.Save(stream);
}

That's all there is to it, open the file up in your Kml viewer and you'll see a push pin over Machu Picchu, labelled with the text we set in the Placemark.Name property.

Here's the complete code for reference:

using SharpKml.Base;
using SharpKml.Dom;
using SharpKml.Engine;

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[]() args)
    {
        // This will be the location of the Placemark.
        var point = new Point
        {
            point.Coordinate = new Vector(-13.163959, -72.545992),
        }

        // This is the Element we are going to save to the Kml file.
        var placemark = new Placemark
        {
            Geometry = point,
            Name = "Machu Picchu",
        }

        // This allows us to save and Element easily.
        KmlFile kml = KmlFile.Create(placemark, false);
        using (var stream = System.IO.File.Create("my placemark.kml"))
        {
            kml.Save(stream);
        }
    }
}