Retrieve latitude and longitude information from a web service

Question

Hello,
  Not sure if this is the right forum or not. If not, please let me know which forum I should use.

I work for a non-profit organization that uses ArcGIS to map locations of Food Stores (about 500) that donate food to our organization for distribution to people who are in need of food. As a developer with no experience with ArcGIS I was wondering if I could do the following:

Create a vba/vb procedure/module within the ArcGIS environment that would allow me to take an address for a food store, send this info out to a geocoding web service (Bing, Yahoo, and Google), and store or update a data source in ArcGIS with the returned latitude and longitude?
We usually have about 5 ??? 10 new locations a month. So, depending on the complexity, my thought might be to teach the enduser to manually get this information and then key it into ArcGIS. I also thought of creating a small MS Access or VB app that would prompt the user for the address and then call a free web service to get the latitude and longitude.

So, if this is something that I can do in ArcGIS, can someone point me in the right direction? Or am I just better off writing a simple app outside of ArcGIS to get the Lat/Long information

Thank you,
Thomas Kroljic

ThomasKroljic · Answer

This is an example of what you could do with ArcGIS API: 
http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/samples/start.htm#AddressToLocation.

You can also look at our concepts page to see what else you can do with the API and what are the requirements for installation should you choose to go with it. http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/help/index.html#//016600000006000000.htm

Michael's question is valid. If you are using ArcGIS Server already, you can take advantage of its features using our API. If you are not, you can evaluate the API without dependency to a personal ArcGIS server.

Jennifer,
  Thanks for the information and links. We are running the desktop version of ArcGIS. I'll read up on the information you sent. At this point, not sure if this is over kill for what I would like to do (allow the user to key in an address and get the lat/lng, then allow them to add this information to their data set that is being mapped/displayed in ArcGIS).

Thomas

ThomasKroljic · Answer

Are you using ArcGIS Server or ArcGIS Desktop (e.g. ArcMap/ ArcCatalog)?

Thanks for the response. We are using the ArcGIS Desktop version 10

Tom

JenniferNery · Answer

This is an example of what you could do with ArcGIS API: http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/samples/start.htm#AddressToLocation.

You can also look at our concepts page to see what else you can do with the API and what are the requirements for installation should you choose to go with it. http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/help/index.html#//016600000006000000.htm

Michael's question is valid. If you are using ArcGIS Server already, you can take advantage of its features using our API. If you are not, you can evaluate the API without dependency to a personal ArcGIS server.
You can program with the ArcGIS API for Silverlight/WPF without installing ArcGIS Server or MapIt on your machine if you have access to an ArcGIS Server or a MapIt via a URL. ESRI offers several sample servers to use when getting familiar with creating Silverlight applications. The samples in this help system use these servers.