Calculating Distance between two Latitude and Longitude GeoCoordinates

Question

I'm calculating the distance between two GeoCoordinates. I'm testing my app against 3-4 other apps. When I'm calculating distance, I tend to get an average of 3.3 miles for my calculation whereas other apps are getting 3.5 miles. It's a big difference for the calculation I'm trying to perform. Are there any good class libraries out there for calculating distance? I'm calculating it like this in C#:

public static double Calculate(double sLatitude,double sLongitude, double eLatitude, 
                               double eLongitude)
{
    var radiansOverDegrees = (Math.PI / 180.0);

    var sLatitudeRadians = sLatitude * radiansOverDegrees;
    var sLongitudeRadians = sLongitude * radiansOverDegrees;
    var eLatitudeRadians = eLatitude * radiansOverDegrees;
    var eLongitudeRadians = eLongitude * radiansOverDegrees;

    var dLongitude = eLongitudeRadians - sLongitudeRadians;
    var dLatitude = eLatitudeRadians - sLatitudeRadians;

    var result1 = Math.Pow(Math.Sin(dLatitude / 2.0), 2.0) + 
                  Math.Cos(sLatitudeRadians) * Math.Cos(eLatitudeRadians) * 
                  Math.Pow(Math.Sin(dLongitude / 2.0), 2.0);

    // Using 3956 as the number of miles around the earth
    var result2 = 3956.0 * 2.0 * 
                  Math.Atan2(Math.Sqrt(result1), Math.Sqrt(1.0 - result1));

    return result2;
}

What could I be doing wrong? Should I calculate it in km first and then convert to miles?

Answer 1

The GeoCoordinate class (.NET Framework 4 and higher) already has GetDistanceTo method.

var sCoord = new GeoCoordinate(sLatitude, sLongitude);
var eCoord = new GeoCoordinate(eLatitude, eLongitude);

return sCoord.GetDistanceTo(eCoord);

The distance is in meters.

You need to reference System.Device.