   Webservice communicating with a real-time app?
  I'm currently looking into developing a little project for myself that relies on sending information over the internet from the clients. So, a webservice comes to mind for doing exactly that: Clients use the webservice to send/receive their information in a standardized way.Sounds good till so far, however, the application I'm developing requires that the server operates on data that isn't very suitable to be stored in a database. Well, it would work fine in a database, except searching the information in a RDBMS wouldn't really work well or efficient. So I will store the information in a specialized tree.I am planning on using .NET for this project, and I'm wondering, how would I accomplish something like this? Operations on the tree cannot run asynchronously. Build an application/service that's being used to store the data and use a remoting style structure to communicate with the service? Or is there an easier way to solve the problem?   
  It depends.  You didn't flesh our the context well enough to come to a view.  What data is being manipulated in the tree, what are the time constraints, etc.?;  Have you evaluated if SQL Server 2008 hierarchy support would accommodate your needs? It would integrate with .net in a seamless way.   ;  The kind of data that I'm handling are GPS coordinates that are updated at regular intervals and polled/matched. Stuffing this in an RDBMS is useless, as I need to do searches based on finding hits within x meter of a specific location. I see SQL Server 2008 seems to support some sort of Spatial database extension, I should look into that to see if it works, and that way using an RDBMS and just a webservice would work perfectly. The amount of time for each update/search doesn't have to be extremely fast, but it shouldn't take more than a few seconds. Toolmaker   ;  I remember seeing a case study about SQL Server 2008 storing and reporting GPS data from a fleet of cargo vehicles, and that it performed quite well at said task. I have merely tested the functionality, and it is relatively easy to use if you're familiar with T-SQL (or practically any other SQL dialect).The real benefit of using integrated geography and geometry types is that you can index your data based on them (and the query optimizer takes this into account too). This can make spatial searches run with very high performance.AND you can combine the spatial types with hierarchy functionality.   ;In the first of a two-part series, design veteran Tadhg Kelly draws from his What Games Are blog to explain the rise to power of Zynga's massively successful social game CityVille.  View the full article