I have a shapefile generated by the ESRI product suite. I do not have any ESRI products and my budget does not support their purchase. Aside from fiscal issues, there may be technical limitations with deploying ESRI products but that's a moot point since we have no money.

Using .NET and, if necessary, open source libraries, how can I read my shape file data and return the polygon that contains a latitude & longitude coordinate? I see this being built as service code and given a coordinate, it returns the polygon. Conceptually not too difficult but I'm not sure which libraries out there will help with this.

Thoughts?


edit #1 - I'd settle for returning the polygon's ID or description or some other string property. If I want more info, I will fetch that using the polygon's ID or name or ???